This is a brilliant move on the part of the University, especially when you consider the accelerating cost of a higher education as well as the increasing demand to for students to have textbooks they can view on multiple digital devices. With this payment motivator for professors, the University is clearly working to align the incentives of professors with those of a concerted effort on the part of higher education institutions to move toward an open textbook and open courseware.

Below is an infographic from OnlineSchools.org that will give you a glimpse in to the drivers behind the open textbook and open source books movement.

Via: Online Schools

U of MN Paying Professors $500 to Review Open Textbooks is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

The AG’s letter below had four key responses:

1. Yes, I was a “victim” of cramming and it is an old scam, with players in the game like the Gambino crime family in the late 1990s
2. Our MN AG, Lori Swanson, is very concerned about these practices. What I did not know is that Attorney General Swanson, alongside Senator Amy Klobuchar, is already going after this category, albeit it appears to be only landline cramming and not mobile cramming, the latter an arguably bigger problem (WCCO story from January 7th here)
3. Minnesota law provides some protection ONLY FOR LANDLINE CRAMMING and NOTHING FOR MOBILE
4. In addition to the MN AG’s office, the Federal Trade Commission and Federal Communications Commission take complaints, and I was encouraged to file mine with them.

Visibility is what matters and Congress will only take action if enough consumers scream about this theft to them. That’s why I was so pleased to see a story on WCCO about mobile cramming (aired on February 1st) so they are paying attention.

Hats off to the journalists at WCCO for covering this story. As more and more of us get online with mobile phones — and our kids get them and respond to who-knows-what online — we need to scrutinize our cell phone bills and most people aren’t savvy enough to even know what’s going on with scams like these.

The wireless companies and scammers economic interests are aligned so there is little incentive for AT&T, Verizon, TMobile, Sprint and others to stop this practice of stealing from all of us. Congress needs to take action…now.

MN Attorney General on Cramming Scamming is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

A guy from the Inver Grove Heights Community Schools Office of Communications, Johnny Germscheid, reached out to us here at Minnov8 to tell us about the event. Its focus is about technology, education and breaking down the communication barrier between children and adults. I’m guessing there will be a lot of learning occurring on both sides (student-as-teacher and adult-as-student).

Students in grades K-12 will be teaching adults how to use iPads, iPods, and other devices and software programs. Conference highlights include:

• Produce and publish an eBook using rich multimedia content.
• Create a digital scrapbook to capture family memories.
• Design a webpage or blog to share your story on the web.
• Find out how to set up and manage your own social networking profile.
• Collaborate electronically to edit documents in a more efficient manner.
• Compose original songs to add flavor to your movies.
• Learn how to get the most out of that new iPad.

This is the second year Inver Grove Heights Community Schools has offered this Student Led Technology Conference. Turns out the Inver Grove Heights school district (ISD 199) was nationally recognized in Washington DC by the Consortium of School Networking (CoSN) this winter for this innovative concept.

The conference is free and open to anyone in the metro, or our entire State for that matter. To check out details about the conference, which takes place on Saturday, February 25th from 8:30am until Noon, visit the event mini-site here.

Student Led Technology Conference is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

3M’s support for SOPA came to light in this post at Digital Trends. Viewing the list was enlightening, especially considering the somewhat confusing array of those in favor of legislation that has virtually the entire tech industry — and specifically cybersecurity, internet inventors and internet engineers — lined up against it and the Senate’s version, Protect IP Act.

While it would have been somewhat less stunning to see a list comprised mostly of media companies, those around them like their law firms, and other clueless organizations supporting this act, it seems to make no sense that a company like 3M would even get in to the discussion.

We have reached out to 3M for a response and will publish it if and when we receive it.

3M Company supports SOPA is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

Walker Art Center new website (click for larger view)

Earlier this week I had a friend send me a Twitter DM saying, “Man…you MUST check out the new Walker Art Center website.” So I headed over there that evening and spent over an hour reading, poking around and seeing what they’d delivered.

To say I was impressed is an understatement: the design is fresh, exciting to view and the content compelling. The breadth and depth of coverage of art and design quickly shifted my mind toward a completely different place, one of consideration, thought and ideas instead of my typical focus on the tech “flipper-flappers” and “eye candy” of this new website they’d delivered.

Others agree. In his post at ArtInfo “Why the Walker’s new website is a big deal“, Tyler Green calls it a “game changer” since the Walker site is atypical for a museum, usually an informational site intended to lead visitors to the art institution’s building and its exhibits. Instead, argues Green, the site redefines how the Walker sees its role: as both a physical and as a virtual hub.

Walker Art executive director, Olga Viso, wrote this article about their new site, saying in part:

“As the Walker’s name signals, we’re a center: a hub that brings together various pursuits related to contemporary art, from presenting the visual, performing, and media arts of our time to publishing the latest scholarly research; collecting art objects and commissioning new works to hosting artist residencies and convening public discussions about art and ideas. Given these activities—and more importantly, our mission to investigate the questions that shape us and inspire us as individuals, cultures, and communities—I’m excited to introduce our new website, an online hub for ideas about contemporary art and culture, both inside the Walker and beyond.”

Talking about the why of launching such an ambitious site redesign, Viso said, “The intent of the new site is to make visible our role as a generative producer and purveyor of content and broadcast our voice in the landscape of contemporary culture.”

Any downsides or critique? Two, but the first is a biggie and the second not so much.

Neither of these gripes is a deal-killer for the new Walker website, but this first one needs to be fixed immediately.

My preferred device for consuming content is, like many of us, an iPad. The only issues I had on the new Walker site was while attempting to watch videos on the Walker Channel as you can see below. If I did click on the “…direct link to the video on YouTube” link it would, of course, make Safari on iPad go away and then it would launch the YouTube app! NOT a good user experience and one UX hiccup in an otherwise awesome, designed experience that the team should fix ASAP.

Walker Channel won't display YouTube videos on iPad (click for larger view)

The other, more minor issue was the homepage load speed — it loaded quickly on a computer (under 4 seconds) but took over 13 seconds to load on my iPad (that on a non-cached-Safari & wireless connection speed averaging 19mbps download speed. Testing occurred one evening at 8pm, 11pm and 9am the next morning). Thinking it might be a Safari issue, I tried loading it on the iPad using alternative browsers Opera Mini, Terra, Atomic Web and iCab Mobile. All delivered the Walker site between 12 and 14 seconds on average.

Speed matters not just for a great user experience, but Google has been very explicit about pagerank and speed starting in 2012. Part of their algorithm will be set to rank based on current standings and links in, of course, but speed is a close second. It’s because Google’s use of computing resources and bandwidth are so enormous that they are trying to drive us all toward making our sites as efficient as possible so as to reduce their consumption of resources and bandwidth. The unknown is how Google will rank “mobile friendly site speed” in their algorithms and I’ve not tested the site on an Android tablet in my same wireless conditions, so cannot attest to the user experience on Android tablets.

Walker website grades at "C" with performance at 73 (click for larger view)

Running YSlow on the Walker homepage gave it a grade of “C” and a performance metric of 73. As a comparison, Minnov8 gets a “C” and a metric of 72, but we’re a bunch of hacks compared to the top-notch team at the Walker, and we’re long overdue for a site redesign.

I was impressed to see, however, that the Walker team has deployed nginx (pro. “engine x”), a web server known for its speed. When you take in to consideration the richness of their magazine-like homepage, it’s tough to fault them for not having a score in the 90s quite yet. I suspect they will continue to optimize the site over time.

AN ACHIEVEMENT THAT IS AN ASSET TO MINNESOTA
To the team at the Walker, we salute you for an ambitious and amazing new site. There is no doubt it will prove to the world that the Walker is a first rate, thought leading institution that comes from a State with a creative class that is also second-to-none in the world. Your new site will also raise the consciousness of the imperative of great design in everything we touch, the products and services we deliver, and the need to recognize artistic beauty in new ways.

Walker Art Center’s Awesome New Website is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

So that you are able to stay informed about developments that may positively or negatively impact your application development or personal use of technology, you should know about an emerging global industry focused on mass-scale spying on mobile devices, social media, or other internet-based use and so you are encouraged to view the video below and then visit Wikileaks – The Spy Files.

In case you are ready to immediately dismiss this as a “foreign country” problem and that it wouldn’t or couldn’t affect you or your organization, remember the “inadvertent” collection of U.S. citizen’s communications when domestic warrantless wiretapping ensued. In addition, it has been revealed that in January 2011, the National Security Agency broke ground on a $1.5 billion facility in the Utah desert that is designed to store terabytes of domestic and foreign intelligence data forever and process it for years to come.

While it is an imperative that our government intelligence agencies can stay on top of the exponential explosion in online communications and technologies, we’ve quickly learned this week with the CarrierIQ “rootkit scandal” how much we don’t know about what software is on our devices, how the carriers are using their ability to track our location within a few feet of our mobile phones is being used, and whether or not they are automatically storing ALL of our data with open, non-warrant-based analysis by intelligence agencies.

The flip side of this is another issue, one that certainly justifies U.S. expenditures and an acceleration in intelligence agency capability. It is how the stakes are rising QUICKLY on everything happening in cyberspace. As more and more of us shop online, map our businesses and processes to the web, interact socially online and can instantly (and for free) talk with anyone, anywhere on the planet, ensuring that the bad guys in other countries aren’t able to mass vacuum up our data and use it against us is critical to our national defense.

Heard About The Mass Spying Industry Yet? is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

It has and the hearings are going on right now but, according to Tim O’Reilly (the tech publisher) on Google+ a moment ago, “This is really important. They aren’t even hearing testimony from opponents of the bill. The “hearings” are a sham, with testimony from supporters only.”

A veritable Who’s Who of tech giants—including Facebook, Google, Twitter, eBay, Yahoo, AOL and Mozilla—explicitly came out against both SOPA and PROTECT-IP in a letter to the ranking members of the House and Senate Judiciary committees

To get you up-to-speed quickly, here’s why this is bad:

Good infographic is here too.

The following came from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF):

Big media and its allies in Congress are billing the Internet Blacklist Legislation as a new way to prevent online infringement. But innovation and free speech advocates know that this initiative is nothing more than a dangerous wish list that will compromise Internet security while doing little or nothing to encourage creative expression.

As drafted, the legislation would grant the government and private parties unprecedented power to interfere with the Internet’s domain name system (DNS). The government would be able to force ISPs and search engines to redirect or dump users’ attempts to reach certain websites’ URLs. In response, third parties will woo average users to alternative servers that offer access to the entire Internet (not just the newly censored U.S. version), which will create new computer security vulnerabilities as the reliability and universality of the DNS evaporates.

It gets worse: Under SOPA’s provisions, service providers (including hosting services) would be under new pressure to monitor and police their users’ activities. While PROTECT-IP targeted sites “dedicated to infringing activities,” SOPA targets websites that simply don’t do enough to track and police infringement (and it is not at all clear what would be enough). And it creates new powers to shut down folks who provide tools to help users get access to the Internet the rest of the world sees (not just the “U.S. authorized version”).

WHAT CAN YOU DO? Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) has placed a hold on the Senate version of the bill, taking a principled stand against a very dangerous bill. But every Senator and Representative should be opposing the PROTECT IP Act and SOPA. Contact our members of Congress now to speak out!

Stop the Internet Blacklist is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

I cannot express enough my thanks for all who helped out:

Lerner Publishing: Kathleen Clarke responded to a blind email request of mine and she put together a big box of brand new, amazingly high quality books, perfect for the English program at Strisuksa school

Meg Knodl

Meg Knodl: As senior librarian in Communications and Community Engagement with Hennepin County (Minn.) Library, Meg had great suggestions on buying surplus books from the library system (a sale was just ending and she connected me with the right folks).

Paul Schroeder

To show the power of social media, I’d placed a plea and link to that Minnov8 post mentioned above on my Facebook wall. Two people responded immediately with a third who joined in:

Paul Schroeder:  A fraternity brother of mine who read about my plea on Facebook responded by collecting several dozen books and even cajoled a friend of his in participating with some novels. These novels, while not perfectly targeted to the students, surprisingly were very welcomed by the teachers!

Sherry Collins: She had several ideas I took advantage of and then recommended a site I’d never heard of, FreeCycle, a kind of “Craigslist for free stuff” and I placed a post in the Minneapolis Group

The very generous donation by Beth Sullivan, volunteer for The Women's Prison Book Project

Beth Sullivan: She responded with 75 classic (and new!) books that were extras from a non-profit she volunteers for, The Women’s Prison Book Project.

As these great volunteers were putting forth such kind efforts to gather books, I’d been interacting with my contact at the school, Lynn Brown. Mentioning the phenomenal work of Project Gutenberg, I asked her to go through the books there and make recommendations and we’d download the books for her (since their internet connections are pretty minimal at the school).

What happened next surprised even me and set me on a course I hadn’t expected. 

Ms. Brown and her colleague in the English department chose 108 Project Gutenberg books. Discovering that the Project Gutenberg books are available in a variety of formats — and offers over 36,000 free ebooks in ePub, Kindle, HTML and simple text formats – I decided to download all of them in these formats as well as two potentially useful for a country in Asia (i.e., Plucker and QiOO Mobile).

After downloading and organizing them in folders I thought, “Hmm…this is going to be tough for the students to find, and download, the books of their choice in their chosen format” so I did what any geek would do: I built an HTML website “front end” for the files.

An (AJAX) dropdown for each book reveals its formats (click for larger view)

Website "front end" for ebooks (click for larger view)

Realizing that the directories with the ebooks in them totaled over 8GBs — and now knowing exactly what technologies they had at their disposal in Thailand — I wasn’t certain if they could read DVD-Rs, would appreciate a bunch of CDs (which, of course, would possibly break the links in the mini website front-end) so I bought a couple of 16GB thumb drives so they would have two copies.

Ms. Brown and her colleagues were quite enthused about receiving this and she then exclaimed, “Oh my gosh…we can put this on the “school” server (vs. just the English department server) and make it available to all students!”

Wish we could have done more for them. Also wished there was a way to get tablets in to the hands of students (or even cheap Kindles) if there was a reliable way for them to download ebooks. Got to think more about this and possible solutions.

So again, thank you to those who helped out and I’ll follow up when I hear how the kids are doing with what you donated!

“Thank You” for the Books for Thai School is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

[This post was originally published earlier today on Tech~Surf~Blog.]

I felt it. I didn’t know it then, but it may have been at the precise moment Steve was passing. I was sitting in a room of about 100 people, mid-afternoon, listening to a panel of educators at the EduTech MN conference at the University of Minnesota. I was actually finishing a blog post on my MacBook Air, and hadn’t even intended to stay for the panel (the startup pitches were over).

But I was surprisingly drawn in by the discussion. I was blown away by what these people, senior educators, were saying — showing so much passion, speaking from the heart, talking about how kids are learning today. They just lit up as they described how the new tablet and mobile technologies are opening up worlds for these kids like nothing they’d ever seen before. The iPad, the iPod Touch, and all the great software these Apple devices have engendered.

I found myself beaming from ear to ear as I listened to them describe their real-life experiences, with such excitement in their voices.  These aren’t boring educators, I thought!  These are really dedicated, committed people who work on the front lines, whose worlds revolve around how our children learn, and how they can make that process better for them, every single day. And, thanks to technology and a certain company named Apple, they have more and more amazing tools to help them do that. It was a special experience for me, as someone not involved much in the world of education. I’m so glad I stayed.

I sat there and thought to myself — right at that very moment — “Wow, would Steve Jobs be proud to be hearing this right now.”

I like to think he was.

Steve, you didn’t just change technology, media, music, and retailing forever.  You changed education, too — in a big, big way. We thank you. We will greatly miss you.

But we know we’ll see the mark you made on this world for a long, long time to come, in the eyes of children everywhere.

[Left to right on the panel: Jesse Thorstad, technology specialist, Fergus Falls school district; Dave Eisenmann, director of instructional tech, Minnetonka school district; Jennifer Sly, MN Historical Society; and Jay Haugen, Superintendent, Farmington school district. The panel was moderated by State Senator Terri Bonoff.]

Something Amazing Happened at #EduTechMN Yesterday – Steve Jobs Was in the Room is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

Their startup coincides with a rising trend in game play and specifically an explosion in online games. Further, promotional forces like Dr. Jane McGonigal, an influential author and occasionally controversial visionary from U.C. Berkley believes that games can solve real-world problems through increasing the amount of time spent playing games to 21 billion hours per week by 2020. There is little doubt that gaming will continue to be an extremely important global activity.

The introduction of platforms like the Nintendo Wii, the Apple iPad, and the Sifteo Cubes has opened up a variety of new options for games. The social-gaming company Zynga has been steadily building innovative games delivered over social networking platforms like Facebook. The MIT Technology Review reported last week that Zynga is planning to produce a drastically more complex, strategic, and socially interactive gave than ever before. In a TechCrunch article last year, it was estimated that half of all Facebook users play games and that 40% of the time spent on Facebook is devoted to social games like those developed by Zynga. Clearly, there is an extensive amount of activity and data being generated through these evolving social interactions in massively multiplayer online games (MMO). 

The founders of Ninja Metrics have designed a technology platform, called the Katana Engine, to understand players’ behaviors in these new online communities. This platform provides a dashboard to help users understand patterns and predictive information which is computationally generated behind the scenes of the system. Dr. Williams describes this business as “providing analytics in social spaces, with both monitoring and predictive work.” These analytics, which consist of both proprietary algorithms and standard methods, are initially being applied to game data generated by players and collected by developers.

The Katana Engine enables analysis about what gamers did in-game, providing key insights into game mechanics.

This product is largely based on collaborative interdisciplinary research from the areas of social science and computer science. Specifically, social science theories have been meshed with advanced methods from artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to assist in accurately predicting human behavior in this system. Dr. Williams goes on to describe a particular competitive advantage from their research which has been baked into the product. He said, “Our primary innovation is an algorithm that can measure social influence within friendship groups. Whereas many companies know how to take advantage of social network research and report who is most connected or central, we can provide who influences whom, and to what extent.” Determining these social influences provides insight into value characteristics of players or actors in the network.

These benefits can extend outside the context of social gaming to industries like telecommunications, retail, and healthcare. While this team’s initial focus is MMO or casual game analysis, which applies to thousands of titles in an exploding online space, their platform is suitable for anyone with large-scale data where people interact. Walmart beefed up its online presence through sophisticated social identity analysis with the purchase of Kosmix to form the entity @WalmartLabs. There is a compelling case for Minnesota-based Target, which recently brought its online stores control back in-house from Amazon, to pursue similar strategies.

Ninja Metrics is utilizing social analytics to help make sense of human behavior, whether it is through game interactions or mountains of data from established industries. Their research-oriented methods, partnerships with universities and overall passion in this space are all a function of innovation for this Minnesota company. 21 billion hours per week of game-play by 2020? We’ll have to see.

Predicting Human Behavior through Games is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

Though many people who have commented here on Minnov8, through Twitter to our account (or our personal ones) seem truly excited when reports in 2007 showed the U.S. exceeded 50% of households had broadband. Then that excitement is tempered with reports like this one stating “U.S. Broadband: Still Expensive; Still Underwhelming” compared to the rest of the world.

But it wasn’t until this FCC comprehensive analysis appeared this week that a clearer picture of the true state of broadband penetration appeared. Take a look at Figure 1(a) from the report (after the jump) and you’ll note that over 92 million of the 133 million U.S. households with broadband have download speeds between 6mbps and 3mbps with 58% of the total having less than 3mbps download speed!

Noted in the report is this interesting tidbit: wireless service subscribers with mobile devices and data plans for full Internet access grew 48 percent to 52 million in the second half of 2009. Some of us who understand much of the technical underpinnings of connection speeds, throughput, and latency on wireless vs. wired connections to the internet are cautiously optimistic about wireless. Though it might be “OK” for many people as their primary access to the internet, the caps on downloading data are even more stringent than a home broadband connection (wireless is often 5GB maximum per month with a cable internet account receiving a 250GB ceiling on downloading).

The bottom line is that you need to have a realistic view of the connection speeds, growth of wireless broadband, geographic distribution and devices as you work on your strategy for internet and web innovation.

FCC: 68% of Broadband Connections NOT Broadband is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

Recently I sat down with the executive director of The Table Project, Ken Finsaas, to learn more about the project, their mission and get some more background. I have to admit that I was more than a bit skeptical about YASN (Yet Another Social Network) being developed when I was introduced to Ken by a guy I know who specializes in placing senior leadership in tech organizations (Kevin Spanbauer, a Senior Partner at VTL Search in Eden Prairie).

My skepticism came from the fact that there are so many other social networking, group collaboration and other similar platforms already in existence. Since Ken has a senior leadership background in I.T. systems, consulting, and outcome-based project delivery, it wasn’t until meeting him and understanding more about their approach—and mostly because Ken later provided me with login credentials so I could poke around inside The Table and actually experience what they’re delivering—that I completely changed my mind and realized that YASN for churches was not only needed, but perfectly positioned for the next phase of growth and meaningful connections by church-going youth.

(Click for larger image)

An non-profit organization called YouthWorks is the parent organization spearheading The Table Project. YouthWorks’ purpose is to, “…provide life-changing, Christ-centered youth mission opportunities. This is our reason for being. We create extraordinarily fun and significant mission adventures, targeted to the needs and capabilities of youth, ages 12-19.” That organization sprung forth due to a recognition that outside-the-U.S. mission trips were incredibly costly and beyond the reach of most youth and their families. Besides the positive impact on youth who engage in these mission trips, YouthWorks saw a great need right here on U.S. soil for youth to help communities and individuals in a myriad of ways.

Experiencing the acceleration in the always-on, always-connected, increasingly-mobile, and socially connected young people that comprise the core demographic YouthWorks serves, The Table Project was begun to empower churches to deliver a platform to connect their members together, while simultaneously extending their respective ministries in to the online and social realm, and to be where young people are increasingly congregating, connecting and socializing….and that’s online.

So is it likely that YASN for churches will work?

The beauty of the The Table Project platform is how simple it is to use and configure. From the moment I logged on the little touches impressed me. The signup process had elegant javascript transitions and the flow of the process (one which often feels jarring) was simple and visually attractive.

A box popped up to ask me if I wanted to take a tour or skip it and dive in. It took me just a few minutes to go through the tour, perfect for the non-web-savvy anxious to get going, but the logical and intuitive layout means that a youthful user with any online experience would be up-n-running in seconds.

APPLICATIONS
Next I jumped in to poke around adding apps. For a pre-launch platform I’m very impressed with what is already available. Facebook and Twitter are here, but The Table Project has curated many others like: USA Today; Dropbox; TED Talks; eBible; Calendar; and dozens of others. By integrating these sorts of applications within The Table Project, the intent is to make it a core place youth will hang out online and help to make their church something other than a place they appear at on Sunday and possibly in a group or two during the week.

(Click for larger view)

CHURCH INTEGRATIONS
Also seeing that The Table Project couldn’t be some “thing” that sits “out there” on the internet separate from a church itself, Ken and crew have already taken strategic steps to partner with leaders in the church space.

One such organization is Fellowship Technologies, a provider of web-based church management software solutions used by ministries around the world. While Fellowship offers rudimentary social networking within their solution suite, they instantly recognized the quantum leap forward made by The Table Project and ensured that those churches opting to extend their member’s social experience to The Table could manage aspects of it from Fellowship’s dashboards.

WILL THEY SUCCEED?
Will The Table Project succeed? If you’d have asked me that question a week ago I would’ve given them a 50/50 chance due to my natural skepticism and the sheer number of other like products in existence. Today I’d say their chances are over 90% since: The Table is already highly focused; aligns the incentives of the churches, their congregations and the youth; and embraces/connects to other relevant services with apps like any good platform should.

The objective is to make The Table Project a self-sustaining non-profit. One way is through the Store on the site. The Table Project will curate, and offer for sale, books and other products that will help generate revenue. We’ll have to see what else is in the offing as they come closer to launch.

All-in-all I’m pretty impressed with The Table and saw few downsides to their approach. The upside of a platform that churches all over the U.S. (and world, I assume) can use, evangelize to one another and help make better through recommendations to The Table Project leadership, holds the promise of being Yet Another Social Network that Christian ministries will embrace to extend themselves directly in to the always-on and always-connected world.

Innovative Social Networking with a Purpose is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

l-r: Co-host Erik Eskola; McKenna Ewen; Julio Ojeda-Zapata; Co-host Cathy Wurzer; Shayla Thiel-Stern (none of whom probably yet see the irony that this Almanac 'new media' segment won't later be shareable)

This past Friday night on Twin Cities Public Television’s (TPT) “Almanac” program, frequent contributor to Minnov8, Julio Ojeda-Zapata, made his first appearance on the show to talk about new media and I thought he knocked it out of the park. He was joined by two other delightful and very knowledgeable panelists, Shayla Thiel-Stern of the University of Minnesota (where she is an assistant professor of journalism and mass communications) and McKenna Ewen from the StarTribune where his focus is on new media work.

Co-host Cathy Wurzer began the segment by saying, “About once a month we gather a group of people to chat up media…old and new” and then went on to introduce the three panel members and jump in to the meat of the conversation. Julio did a fantastic job on the segment (fun video Julio!) and I was eager to create a post this morning here on Minnov8 and embed the Almanac segment, but it wasn’t until I sat down to write that I discovered that TPT is still living in an old media world:

TPT does not enable or allow video to be embedded in a blog!

“Wait a second,” I thought. “You mean that if I want to embed the “new media” segment with Julio in it I have to click on this link to load a new page and pop up a window just like an “old media, we gotta protect our content” company!?!” Sadly, the answer is “Yes“ and the irony is obviously lost on TPT.

Here is what you need to do, TPT.

Start off by reading the Cluetrain Manifesto (which you can read for free), then view a few research reports from Pew Internet on who is doing what online and how ubiquitous sharing is already, look at the 2010 State of the Media report to see the decline in old media like your own and how anyone under 45 isn’t paying attention anymore, or even ask the rhetorical question as to why people are watching 2 billion videos a day on YouTube and uploading, every minute of every day, 24 hours worth of video!

Or maybe, just maybe, you should bring in Julio, Shayla and McKenna to not just be on a 10 minute panel, but rather to talk to TPT leadership so you can create a strategy to be and stay relevant as a media outlet and make damn sure everything you deliver is shareable.

TPT, forget about locking things up in your “Minnesota Video Vault” (and please change that name when you do embark on an actual new media strategy) and instead, toss open the doors and let your community post, remix and curate your video content. We can help you make TPT a vital resource for an audience of we new media and social media consumers who rarely watch television anymore.

Almanac runs on Friday nights so I DVR it for later viewing, and as painful as it is to watch it online the content is so good that I always recommend that my friends and family make this show (and other stuff you deliver) a regular part of their week. It’s a great way to keep one’s finger on the pulse of the important community, political and cultural zeitgeist of Minnesota.

Thank God you’re bringing in John Daenzer, current Director of New Media at WCCO, who recently announced he is headed to TPT to be VP of Interactive. John “gets it”, spearheaded the WCCO iPhone app and The Wire, and has done a remarkable job courting the new and social media community like NO OTHER traditional media outlet has in Minnesota. The big bonus is that John is willing to listen and ask the hard questions…while respecting that the transition from old to new media is a tough one.

But start right now on breaking up Almanac in to its discrete segments and at least putting the content on YouTube. What you offer now for access vs. embedding is an embarrassment.

Without Any Sense of Irony, Almanac Hosts a Panel on New Media is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

Every day I scan hundreds of blog posts, articles and tweets having to do with technology. Included in that scanning is a 4-5 times per day viewing of Techmeme, the technology ‘conversation tracker’ that connects key articles and posts with those who’ve linked to it, enabling you and I to see what the hot stories are at the moment and at-a-glance.

What’s become clear over the last several years is one key shift: the rate of technological change is accelerating. Almost daily there is some key feature announced, a new product or service, or some new insight, which almost instantly makes its way across the internet and raises the consciousness and awareness levels of those of us paying attention.

The scientist Ray Kurzweil is arguably the #1 thought leader in the area of accelerating change after the publication of his 2005 book “The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology” and the creation of his subsequent Singularity Conference.

The premise in Kurzweil’s book is the coming technological singularity and how we will be able to augment our bodies and minds with technology. He describes the singularity as resulting from a combination of three important technologies of the 21st century: genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics (including artificial intelligence).

Having attempted to read the book three times until finally succeeding on my fourth try, it’s tough to refute Kurzweil’s arguments that we’re living not only in a time of accelerating change, but that that change is exponential. That said, there have been several prominent thinkers and scientists who criticize his speculation and approaches.

What does accelerating or exponential change mean to you? Here is Ray Kurzweil telling you about the singularity in less than 7 minutes:

When you consider the technology shifts and changes your great-grandparents, grandparents, parents (and even you) have experienced already, I can only imagine the things we’ll see over the next several decades. Hang on to your hats…it’s gonna be a heckuva ride!

Accelerating Change is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

At the head of the poll they state, “Innovation: The health of the economy depends on it. Our schools are meant to encourage it. But innovation isn’t a widget that can be stamped out on the assembly line. It’s the product of a delicate recipe of education, technology and entrepreneurship. We’d like your help exploring where innovation is happening, and where it’s not, but should be.”

When I received an email invite today to respond to the poll, I was initially excited since I assumed (wrongly) that this was open to general public and/or MPR members at large. As it turns out I received the invite since I’m one of a select number of “Public Insight Network” contributors to yet another subsite on MPRNewsQ called “Minnesota Today“.

Minnesota Today is a crowdsourced article input site from a number of people who (hopefully) have insight in to important and interesting we all come across daily while reading online. We submit links to a moderated queue and they’re looked at and posted periodically throughout each day. I’m expecting this connection might enable me to obtain the results of this poll early—or at least be able to publish them quickly here on Minnov8—and I’ll try to let you know what people say as soon as possible.

Though I’m a contributor and fan of MPR, the website has so much going on and is so layered and nuanced, it’s a real challenge to find anything…including my modest contributions at Minnesota Today. In fact, I’ve talked to about a dozen hard-core MPR and Twin Cities Public Television members who had no clue Minnesota Today even existed and for a couple of others who did, had no idea I contributed. Others are taken aback that there are “special” polls like this that are not open to the public at large and I’d have to agree.

Still, this is a good start on an innovative use of the web and crowdsourcing and I applaud MPR for the effort.

MPR: Where is innovation in Minnesota? is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

A fake Skype call highly unlikely to ever occur

In a time when cybersecurity has become the new battleground among nations and calls for enhanced national defense online are accelerating, Congresswoman Michele Bachmann is trumpeting the use of a technology for communications that has an unknown security model and seems at odds with the usual Republican focus on national security.

An article by Jeremy Herb in the StarTribune this morning caught my eye, “Bachmann pushes Congress to embrace Skype.” It outlines the reasons why Rep. Michele Bachmann is calling for the use of the free Skype program on Congressional networks—so she and others can talk directly with their constituents or hold “virtual town halls”—but its use is banned in the House of Representatives.

The article quotes a University of Minnesota computer science professor, Joseph Konstan, who says this about the fundamental reason a peer-to-peer program like Skype is problematic and why it would be banned: ”The reason people worry about using tools like these is they are inherently insecure. The design of Skype is something that hasn’t been carefully scrutinized, and so it may very well be there are bugs in there.”

Sure there could be bugs, but the biggest reason installing Skype on Capitol computer networks is a huge problem is because of that unknown security model of Skype. It is not possible to know much about the security of Skype since their code is proprietary and is not open to peer review or close examination of potential security holes.

As a fan of Skype and someone who has used it daily for several years, I evangelize its use constantly. That said, I wouldn’t want my government to embrace it without some very close scrunity and safeguards and I’m puzzled why Rep. Bachmann would now be banging-the-drum for Congress to adopt Skype. Here’s why doing so isn’t wise.

Lawmakers are questioning the Department of Homeland Security’s readiness for cybersecurity attacks and according to this article in NetworkWorld, “Reported attacks on U.S. agencies increased by 400% from 2006 to 2009, said Rep. Bennie Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat and committee chairman. “Whether the military or intelligence-gathering operations of foreign nations; domestic or international terrorist groups; lone-wolf, hate-driven individuals; common criminals, or thrill-seeking hackers, those attempting to infiltrate and exploit this country’s computer networks are both numerous and determined,” he said.”

The need for enhanced cybersecurity leadership has been pointed out by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO). This agency is adamant that the government doesn’t have a prioritized national cybersecurity research and development agenda. In a report released on July 7th (PDF), the concern is that government officials don’t have the ability to track all active and completed cybersecurity programs and much of a process to share key information between government and industry.

Quite simply, it is unknown whether it would be “safe” to load Skype on Capitol computer networks or not and when lawmakers are calling for coordinated and orchestrated approaches to cybersecurity and the GAO says we’re not ready as a nation, Skype red flags like these are highly troubling (from Wikipedia):

• “Skype incorporates some features which tend to hide its traffic, but it is not specifically designed to thwart traffic analysis and therefore does not provide anonymous communication. Some researchers have been able to watermark the traffic so that it is identifiable even after passing through an anonymizing network.” (PDF)

• “Skype uses a proprietary Internet telephony (VoIP) network based on peer-to-peer architecture. The protocol has not been made publicly available by Skype and official applications using the protocol are closed-source.“

• “Skype is a secure communication; encryption cannot be disabled, and is invisible to the user. Skype reportedly uses non-proprietary, widely trusted encryption techniques: RSA for key negotiation and the Advanced Encryption Standard to encrypt conversations. Skype provides an uncontrolled registration system for users with no proof of identity. Instead, a free choice of nicknames permits users to use the system without revealing their identity to other users. It is trivial to set up an account using any name; the displayed caller’s name is no guarantee of authenticity. A third party paper analyzing the security and methodology of Skype was presented at Black Hat Europe 2006. It analyzed Skype and found a number of security issues with the current security model. (see, “Silver Needle in the Skype” PDF).”

Unless this call by Rep. Bachmann is a veiled attempt to ask for the use of an insecure Skype use but is really all about drawing attention to an to-be-alleged cybersecurity leadership issue that can be leveraged in the upcoming elections, perhaps the U.S. Chief Information Officer, Vivek Kundra, can sit down with her over a cup of coffee and educate her on the reasons why cybersecurity is in our national interest and Skype is a bad idea.

Congresswoman Calls for Skype Use? is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

But Catherine was frustrated. She saw that the required AmeriCorps reporting was excruciatingly difficult for a program director to create and deliver so, like any good entrepreneur, she set about leveraging her background and abilities as a filmmaker, database design, technologist and advocate to pull together a team, obtain funding and set about writing her own software as a service (SaaS)!

Other State programs caught wind of what she was up to and climbed on board as initial customer/funders. The result of her efforts has evolved in to OnCorps Reports™ which provides web-based reporting and communication tools for National and Community Service programs, including AmeriCorps, VISTA, Senior Corps and Learn & Serve programs. Designed specifically to support service programs, the application framework is easily modified for use by any Non-Profit organizations to manage volunteers or staff, monitor program progress, and utilize financial reporting tools.

When we had coffee this week, I was at first delightfully surprised at how powerful and robust OnCorps Reports was and how it had a very well executed user interface, but at the same time I thought, “What the hell!?! Why isn’t Catherine involved with the minne* crowd, showing at Minnedemo or leading sessions at Minnebar? Connected to the startup community here in Minnesota?” So we spent some time having her walk me through the software and me thinking out loud about how to connect her immediately within our tech community and get her more attention from those of us keenly interested in discovering MN startup success stories.

OnCorps Reports’ mission is to provide state-of-the-art technology tools to help Non-Profit organizations and Community Service programs successfully collect, aggregate and analyze program data. OnCorps Reports™ strives to make it as easy as possible for program staff, participants and beneficiaries to share their success stories with funders, volunteers and the communities they serve, and greatly simplifies State and Federal grant reporting.

The key to the demand for software of this type is the old adage, “You can’t manage what you can’t measure” and it certainly allows program directors and State program management to do exactly that, but the mission-critical piece is ensuring that the lifeblood of AmeriCorps, its volunteers, can enter their served hours in an AmeriCorps program (if they’re even one hour shy of their service requirement it doesn’t count as volunteer service!) as well as recruit their replacement for the next year’s program (a commitment volunteers make when participating in AmeriCorps). The last critical one is mitigating the risk that an AmeriCorps program won’t fall short of its requirements and measured objectives and be in danger of losing its funding.

From what I saw in our brief time together and a casual demo, the hosted software certainly performed as a mature “Service as a Software” (SaaS) application. Designed in association with AmeriCorps State Commissions and program directors, the product suite Catherine and team have delivered is currently the market leader in AmeriCorps reporting systems, serving 20,000 users in 16 states.

A high level view of the OnCorps Reports software

One example of how a program director (or in this case a State Commission staffer) can easily get a scorecard-like view of each AmeriCorps program in their State, and quantify key aspects needed to be measured

So where is OnCorps Reports at today on their path to wildly successful and complete reporting dominance? Since their sales today are pretty much driven by unsolicited client referrals (they simply don’t have enough staff to sell and market to all 50 States and the hundreds of AmeriCorps program directors) they’re clearly trying to determine next steps and find ways to get the word out. That’s why I asked Catherine at our coffee to immediately send me information on OnCorps Reports so I could do this post and help her get more attention for this very worthy and important endeavor.

If you have ideas or have people whom you’d like to connect with Catherine, send an email to: info@oncorpsreports.com and let her know your thoughts or, obviously, leave a comment below.

OnCorps Reports: A MN Success Story is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

No one will be able to read these digital books — at least for now — because of a five-year-old copyright lawsuit against Google. Five million books at the University of Michigan are threatened with the same fate.

Bummer. Read the entire article here.

StarTribune: Digital books put on hold at UofMN is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

The initiative will take approximately two years to complete. The idea behind this is to preserve legacy library works, but it will also provide university students the luxury of having these volumes available online to search, and perhaps even read in their entirety.

According to the CIC projects site, “Google will scan and make searchable public domain works as well as copyrighted materials, in a manner consistent with copyright law.” In the case of the University of Minnesota, over one million works will be digitized from their libraries. All works will be fully searchable, and some will be fully readable.

While this may be inconvenient for students looking to check-out works that are currently in Google’s hands, they will have the ability to find them through inter-library loans. In addition, the books will only be unavailable for a short time. According to Marlo Welshons, Communications Director for University of Minnesota Libraries, “The timeframe for the books being ‘checked out’ by Google for digitization is about the same as the loan period of any other patron.”

This process comes at a low cost to University libraries: Google is footing the bill for book transfers and scanning. The library is only responsible for finding and returning the books to their shelves.

For more information, check out the University of Minnesota’s Google Digitization Project page.

University of Minnesota Participates in Google Books Project is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

This court ruling struck down the Bush Administration FCC’s position over Comcast throttling BitTorrent peer-to-peer traffic over their network. BitTorrent is frequently cited by technologists as a bandwidth-intensive, enormous file size sharing method which strains any internet network.

Is this truly a blow to net neutrality?

Certainly there is concern about any opportunity to increase the control many of these large internet providers enjoy. But in a piece about this ruling on GigaOm entitled, “Comcast vs FCC: In Battle For Net Neutrality, Did the Courts Hand Comcast a Pyrrhic Victory?“, writer Stacy Higginbotham presents this data point from the investment bank Stifel Nicolaus:

Today’s ruling is destabilizing as it could effectively free broadband providers from FCC regulation over broadband, including net neutrality, rules requiring transparency letting customers know what actual speeds they are receiving, the ability to prioritize emergency communications, consumer privacy protections (though these could presumably be imposed to a certain degree by the FTC). But it could lead the FCC to reclassify broadband services as the more heavily regulated “telecommunications service” under the traditional Title II – which the Bells, cable, and wireless companies (e.g., T, VZ, CMCSA) strongly oppose.

So it’s feasible that the FCC will double-down on internet providers with a new suite of regulations which impose stringent standards on a neutral internet while preserving the opportunities for internet providers to succeed.

Comcast’s statement on the ruling:

“We are gratified by the Court’s decision today to vacate the previous FCC’s order. Our primary goal was always to clear our name and reputation. We have always been focused on serving our customers and delivering the quality open-Internet experience consumers want. Comcast remains committed to the FCC’s existing open Internet principles, and we will continue to work constructively with this FCC as it determines how best to increase broadband adoption and preserve an open and vibrant Internet.”

The FCC’s statement (PDF) on the ruling:

“The FCC is firmly committed to promoting an open Internet and to policies that will bring the enormous benefits of broadband to all Americans. It will rest these policies — all of which will be designed to foster innovation and investment while protecting and empowering consumers — on a solid legal foundation.

“Today’s court decision invalidated the prior Commission’s approach to preserving an open Internet. But the Court in no way disagreed with the importance of preserving a free and open Internet; nor did it close the door to other methods for achieving this important end.”

To learn more:

+ Washington Post:  ”Court rules for Comcast over FCC in ‘net neutrality’ case”

+ The Wall Street Journal: “Court Backs Comcast Over FCC on ‘Net Neutrality’”

+ BusinessWeek: “Comcast Wins in Case on FCC Net Neutrality Powers”

+ San Jose Mercury News: “‘Net neutrality’? It’s Comcast’s Net; it can do what it wants”

+ Wired: “Appeals Court Throttles FCC’s Net Neutrality Authority”

Comcast Wins Battle Over the FCC is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.