Regardless of your political views, citizen journalism, social media use in activism, and a massive shift in tools for creating video, audio and then self-publishing and distributing it, is fundamentally changing the way political opinions are shaped and one guy is at the epicenter of that trend in Minnesota.

Chuck Olsen is a cofounder of The UpTake, a non-profit dedicated to training and distributing the work of video-based citizen journalists. He is also the founder of Minnesota Stories (soon to relaunch), called one of the best videoblogs by the New York Times. He is the producer-director of “Blogumentary,” the first documentary film about the rise of political and personal blogs. His work has screened at the Walker Art Center, Get Reel Documentary Film Festival, Harvard University, and on renegade laptops all around the world. He is the Minneapolis correspondent for Rocketboom and works as a freelance producer, videographer, editor and educator.

Chuck’s personal blog, Blogumentary, is here.

Mentioned during this show are:

+ Julio Ojeda-Zapata’s (blog) article in the Pioneer Press that kickstarted Chuck’s notoriety

+ Technology and other links of stuff mentioned includes:

• Funder of TheUptake, America Votes
• Qik (and Kevin Rose‘s demo of iPhone streaming) used for TheUptake streaming 
• Twitter
• Zanby
• Flixwagon (what Chuck uses for personal streaming video) 
• Mogulus - a live broadcast video platform
• Civicspace which is built on Drupal
• The hottest video at TheUptake right now (due to recent controversy on the Chris Matthews show), Michele Bachmann’s ”Not All Cultures Are Equal” video;
• CafePress

Minnov8 Gang Podcast – Episode 11 is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.