Using Social Media to Enhance Community

I'm doing a new community film project entitled 'Using Social Media to Enhance Community' (until I can come up with a better name). This film will briefly explore what social media is (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, blogging, wikis) followed by interview clips, short screencasts, and some fly-on-the-wall views of at least one in-person meeting of people who are involved in social media.

Right now I'm looking for some non-technical people who would provide a balance to the tech-savvy people who I am interviewing. The focus for the interview and video with non-technical people is to explore how their reaction to using social media applications for community-building. Although the tone of this film is intended to be positive toward the use of social media for communities, hearing some of the difficulties would also be constructive.

I may also explore how social media is used in secondary or pre-secondary education, how it is perceived and used by the leaders and workers of the future, although I haven't decided if this will make it into this film.

If you are someone interested in participating in this project, to be interviewed or to recommend others, please contact me.

Sharing Foundation

I've added a widget on the right side of my blog (down there, see it?) for accepting donations to the Sharing Foundation which provides a lot of help for children in need in Cambodia. Whichever organization receives the largest number of unique donors will receive $50,000. as part of America's Giving Challenge.

I learned of the challenge and the Sharing Foundation from Beth Kanter's blog. Beth, who is on the Executive Board of the foundation, is a tireless advocate of the use of social media in non-profits and provides educational and consulting services as such. Her interest and dedication to the children of Cambodia is awesome.

Please consider the Sharing Foundation as you decide on your year-end (or January 2008) charitable contributions. If enough people donate, we will have helped the Sharing Foundation get an additional $50K to help Cambodian children.

Podcasting with the H2

Part of this week off I've spent researching where to host an audio podcast and playing with my new Zoom H2 mobile recorder. There are plenty of good hosting sites from what I can see but libsyn.com (Liberated Syndication) seems like a good place and it's hosting some very popular podcasts. I like their pricing: you pay for a maximum disk space usage each month starting at 100MB for $5.00 and incrementing from there. So if it looks like you're going to surpass your limit you can just upgrade another $5.00 and get a lot more space per month. Easy.

The H2 is pretty cool. Although I'm no pro when it comes to these devices, I can see that it is packed with a lot of functionality in a small package and at a good price. I recorded my voice at different settings, downloaded the wav files to my pc using the USB interface cable and listened. I'm impressed with the quality of the recording as well as microphone options: 2/4 channel stereo. I recorded to a 4GB SDHC card (that's the largest the H2 supports, but it's plenty given that it reported I had well over six hours of remaining audio space after just recording for about a minute).

So I now know that I can do either in-studio recording (that would be in my home office) or field recording. The H2 comes with a wind sock and a detachable handle for convenient interviewing. I'll have to do some practice to get the sound right, as well as brush up on journalistic interviewing skills. But the real hill to climb for podcasting is going to be getting an audience. Right now my blog is not widely read (but you, dear reader, I do thank you for your attention!) and the blog and podcast topics are not aligned with my full-time career in software engineering like some other technies I know.

But that's no reason to not do it. As one of my heroes, RFK, said

"Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope."

I would like my participation in Social Media (i.e., blogging, podcasting, social media sharing sites like FaceBook) to be used to make the world a better place, not just to have online friends and a place to go to when I'm alone in a coffee shop with my computer. I don't mean to imply that that's not okay for someone. But I've passed the half-century mark and I feel that I can more effectively use my remaining time. Ughh, that sounds gloomy, but it's not meant to.

I'm going to try to narrow the focus of my blog (maybe I'll create a separate blog for personal news of interest mostly to my family and closest friends) and align the podcast with it. So I've got to get thinking about how to do this. Any advice from readers is very welcome!