Ira Flatow: TalkingScience Cabaret” on August 8th

Those of you who attended our “radio breakfast” back in July of last year (2007) should remember our good friend, Ira Flatow, host of “Talk of the Nation: Science Friday” on NPR. Also, if you attended our 3D Video event a few months ago you should remember my old friend, Jerry Marks of “Pulltime 3D Studios”

Talia Page, a good friend, and NY:MIEG colleague is working with Ira on an exciting event. Below is the email Talia sent yesterday.

-Bill

The Definition of Generosity

Those of you who received my newsletter this week might have noticed the photograph of the waterfall under the Brooklyn Bridge. My friend, Betsy Aaron, emailed me earlier today inviting me to check her blog posting about it earlier this month.

-Bill

The Definition of Generosity: Olafur Eliasson

by be.aaron

He gives you experience: put your eyes inside the color blue, participate in a parade of monochromatic people, watch rain drops sparkle and freeze, suspended mid-flight.

Also, if you are severely grumpy, returning home after a long day of air travel, and you are driving down the FDR to Brooklyn, his Waterfalls will make both you and your crabby cabbie smile.

Don’t miss the East River installations, the pacifist alternative to militaristic fireworks.

TO CHECK OUT MORE COOL STUFF FROM BETSY’S BLOG “FREE be.aaron” CLICK HERE

Next @ NY:MIEG on December 17th

2008 Looking Back/2009 Looking Ahead - Join our special guests: George Kliavkoff, Chief Digital Officer at NBC Universal and Limor Schafman, President of the KeystoneTech Group on Wednesday December 17th from 7:30am to 9:30am at the Samsung Experience at Time Warner Center.

Chances are the next big digital media company won’t be built on a new technology…it will likely be built with existing technology, by figuring out how to perfect it.

However,  if successful digital media companies like Google, YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, Digg, companies have taught us anything, it’s that the technology is in fact secondary…it’s the people that matter. All of these companies understood that the web isn’t just about technology or about content…it’s about people using technology, people creating content.

Google,for example,  figured out that when people search for something on the web, they don’t want to go to a cluttered, head-ached inducing portal page. They don’t want winking, blinking rich media. People just want to type words in a box and get a bunch of links.

FOR REGISTRATION AND EVENT INFORMATION CLICK HERE

The Food Detectives

I read about an interesting new program this morning that will premiere on The Food Network this week called “Food Detectives” that looks like lots of fun…a sort of cross between “Unwrapped,” “Good Eats,” and a bit of “Newton’s Apple” and “Mr. Wizard”

~Bill

Food Detectives

Scripps Howard News Service
July 28, 2008

Premieres tomorrow night at 9 on Food Network

HOST Ted Allen, who was the food and wine specialist on the Emmy-winning “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.”

THE DEAL The series promises to explore the link between science and food by revealing answers to some of the world’s most puzzling food mysteries.

With the help of editors from Popular Science magazine, each half-hour episode will involve experiments designed to answer age-old questions like, “Will an apple a day really keep the doctor away?”

MORE EXPERIMENTS Allen made his cohorts stuff their mouths with hot peppers so he could find the best remedy for stopping that painful burning sensation you get after eating certain spicy foods.

On another show, he tests the centuries-old myth that ginger prevents motion sickness or cure nausea. To carry out the experiment, “We had to come up with a way to make people nauseated,” he said. How did he do it? “Think lots of hot dogs, fast-moving taxis, carnival rides,” he said.

Amanda Michel: The 21st Century Journalist

NY:MIEG events are based on three simple critria: 1) meet new people, 2) learn something new and 3) have a good time doing it! And one of the things I am most proud of is the incredible group of friends and supporters as well as some of the most intelligent speakers and panelists around…and my new friend, Amanda Michel is no exception.

As you might have read, Amanda is working with me, Merrill Brown and Lloyd Trufelman on our exciting event on September 9th all about grassroots techniques use during the current presidential politics and how it adapts to other applications such as media and corporate marketing.

In case you are interested, Amanda Michel is Director of OffTheBus. Amanda started in politics during the 2003-2004 campaign cycle, working as the National Director of Generation Dean and then creating and managing the MediaCorps program for the Kerry-Edwards campaign. Along with several other Kerry-Edwards coworkers she helped co-found the New Organizing Institute in the wake of the 2004 election. Since then she’s taken her online organizing skills to media, working at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society and on Assignment Zero, a Wired and NewAssignment.net collaboration.

Amanda along with her team at OffTheBus were recently highlighted in a fascinating article in the NY Times entitled “Off the Bus, but Growing Thousands Strong.”

I thought you’d find it of interest.

-Bill

The New York Times/nytimes.com

July 23, 2008
On Line
Off the Bus, but Growing Thousands Strong
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE

OffTheBus.net, the online citizen-journalist arm of the Huffington Post, celebrates its one-year anniversary this month.

Of all the new political, non-candidate sites to spring up during the last year, OTB is now probably the biggest, with 7,500 citizen correspondents. Through its growing pains, it continues to develop the technological and organizational know-how to become a force in journalism even as it challenges the standard notions of traditional journalism.

We have been charting the site’s progress throughout the campaign, with a report in October about its start-up and an interview in April with Mayhill Fowler, the correspondent who gained notoriety after reporting Senator Barack Obama’s “bitter” comments from a closed fund-raiser.

The site has evolved in several different ways. Perhaps most strikingly, OTB’s total of 7,500 citizen correspondents is up from 300 a year ago. Arianna Huffington, who helped found OTB, attributes the dramatic rise to the buzz created by Ms. Fowler’s two big scoops, first the Obama comments, then in early June when Bill Clinton lashed out at a Vanity Fair writer.

The scoops created news and also prompted intense self-reflection among traditional journalists (it’s all about us!). Had Ms. Fowler successfully pushed the envelope for campaign reporting? Or had she so fractured the rules that she set journalism back? Either way, she has become a rainmaker for OTB, the modern-day equivalent of Woodward and Bernstein inspiring hundreds of young cubs to become investigative journalists.

“The numbers started going up with Mayhill, then they accelerated,” Ms. Huffington said. “She became the poster child for ordinary citizens being able to impact the campaign.”

These vast numbers of fresh recruits give OTB an even greater capacity to undertake the kind of projects it originally set out to do, particularly the so-called “distributive” or “collaborative” kind of reporting in which the work is distributed among many different contributors.

Amanda Michel, the 30-year-old director of OTB, is the organizational brains behind this growing army.

That’s an apt description of the outfit she oversees. Ms. Michel was born at Ft. Benning, Ga., and grew up on various Army bases, the daughter of a Green Beret in special ops and a Dutch mother who now teaches French. She has brought that very nomenclature to OTB and, among her many innovations, has started a “Special Ops” section with its own logo. Special Ops, OTB style, is basically an intelligence-gathering operation, which deploys citizen journalists to sweep up information in a systematic way. The results may yield breaking news or simply help OTB build its data base on the campaigns.

FOR THE COMPLETE STORY FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES CLICK HERE

Criss Angel

Criss Angel Mindfreak®
“67/68 - Building Implosion Escape”
Wednesday, July 30 @ 10pm/9C

Networking 201

I have had a the pleasure of attending a number of events with Joel Ordesky and they are all excellent. This one in particular is worth attending if you plan to be in the Los Angeles area next week.

Many first time networkers ask me “now that I have agreed to attend your event what do I do?”

Below is a great overview

-Bill

15 Second Pitch

Laura Allen is a longtime NY:MIEG member (a true FOBS) and a very special friend. I have been following the success of “15 Second Pitch” and glad to see her do well with it.

I wanted to share with you a current update I received today.

-Bill

Dear Bill,

My partner Jim and I are very excited to relaunch the 15secondpitch.com newsletter! You may have seen me at a recent event like the Small Business Summit 2008 - if not, let me introduce myself!

My name is Laura Allen and I teach people to market themselves more effectively using the 15SecondPitch™. In 2002 I co-founded 15secondpitch.com, a site that provides free tools to help you create a great pitch and share it with thousands of other members.

That’s actually the start of my 15SecondPitch™ - does it help you understand what I do? Did it spark a little interest in you about what a 15SecondPitch™ is and how it can help you in your self-marketing efforts? To see the difference a good intro can make, check out this 1-minute before and after video from a recent workshop I conducted for CareerPeeks.

Help us celebrate the relaunch of our newsletter by sharing how your 15SecondPitch™ has helped you achieve success. In our next issue I’ll share some of the best stories with our readers and explain why they work - so send your success story to me at success@15secondpitch.com and maybe you’ll get your 15 seconds of fame!

Here’s to you pitching like a pro! Enjoy!

Laura Allen
Co-founder, 15secondpitch.com
P.S. I’d love to hear from you! Send me your ideas for the newsletter - or anything else to do with the 15SecondPitch - at ideas@15secondpitch.com!

Ed Koch Movie Reviews: “Days & Clouds” & “The Dark Knight”

Movie Review: “Days and Clouds” (+)

July 21, 2008

This film moved me emotionally. Although it takes place in Italy, it could be a snapshot of what is currently happening across America.

The central characters are Michele (Antonio Albanese) and his beautiful wife, Elsa (Margherita Buy). The couple, who appear to be in their 50s and very much in love, have a 20-year-old daughter, Alice (Alba Rohrwacher). Because Alice’s boyfriend is unacceptable to papa, she moves out of the parental home.

One evening Michele confesses to Elsa that he has lost his job. He was forced out of the company by two other partners and has not worked for the past two months. Since Michele cannot pay their mortgage, the couple will have to sell their home and small cabin cruiser to pay their expenses. Elsa, who restores frescos in ancient buildings as a hobby, states that she will find a good-paying job. Indeed, she secures two jobs, the second of which involves sexual advances from her boss.

How the couple copes with their financial issues will move you. Seeing Michele slip into a state of depression as a result of his job loss was very difficult to watch, especially when he seeks to collect a debt owed to him by a friend who claims he has already repaid the loan. I wept for a moment witnessing one particular scene. The movie doesn’t have a final resolution with a satisfying ending, but it is an honest-to-God display of what can happen to people.

Last week former Texas Senator Phil Gramm referred to America’s economic slowdown as “a mental recession,” and called its citizens “a nation of whiners.” He went on to say, “You just hear this constant whining, complaining, about a loss of competitiveness, America in decline. We’ve never been more dominant; we’ve never had more natural advantages than we have today.” What a dope. Regrettably, millions of people in the U.S. today are worried about how they will manage financially in their retirement years. (In Italian, with English subtitles.)

——————–

I would recommend you see the movie, hoping some profits will go to Ledger’s two-year-old daughter. It is also slightly cooler to boast that you saw it rather than that you did not see it. And those of you who are interested in the geography of Gotham will find the picture informative. There is enough swinging from roofs and windows to make Batman an urban Tarzan, but capable of an extended dialogue with the Joker as the crime fighter dangles from a ledge by his fingerprints. Not to worry, no hero or anti-hero is killed off, they will be needed for the inevitable sequel.”

Movie Review: “The Dark Knight” (-)

July 22, 2008

I may be the only moviegoer in America who has seen the current Batman film and thinks it is ridiculous.

The theater was packed when we arrived for a 12:30 p.m. show on Sunday afternoon and only a few seats were available in the front row. Afraid of getting reverse vertigo from looking up at the screen, I searched a little longer and located a seat further back. Once settled, I looked forward to seeing the movie which has received so many favorable reviews. I was disappointed when it finally ended, however, and wondered if the media blitz and ensuing frenzy compelled people to say they enjoyed the film.

I like movies that display some violence and enjoy watching blood and guts being spilled on the big screen. If you feel that way, you won’t be disappointed in this one, especially the scenes involving fires and explosions. In the end, however, it adds up to nothing. As Shakespeare wrote in Macbeth, “It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

The story is the same old, same old of Batman saving Gotham City from vile criminals led by the super villain, the Joker. I violate no confidence when I tell you he does so once again. All the characters, especially Bruce Wayne/Batman (Christian Bale) and his love, Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal), are stick figures. Gyllenhaal is a fine actress but her performance in this film is nothing to write home about. Other characters include Bruce Wayne’s faithful butler Alfred Pennyworth (Michael Caine), Police Lieutenant James Gordon (Gary Oldman), District Attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) and Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman), Wayne’s factotum who is as delicious as ever.

Much as been made of Heath Ledger’s over-the-top performance as the Joker. It has been touted as extraordinary and worthy of a posthumous Oscar. Absurd. Jack Nicholson who played the Joker in the 1989 “Batman” film was better. Ledger was a fine actor, but this picture did not provide him with a role worthy of his talents. I believe he will be best remembered for his portrayal of Ennis Del Mar in “Brokeback Mountain,” and his delivery of the plaintive line, “I wish I could quit you.”

HS said: “The litany of murders by various means, explosions, defenestrations, assassinations a la Anwar Sadat, strangulation and garden variety GSWs (gun shot wounds) leaves nothing to the imagination. The problem is that the plot becomes so twisted no one can keep track of it, and the movie turns into a simple platform for the grotesque, which the viewer may or may not savor.

I thought Heath Ledger was excellent as the demented psychopath.

Can We Control The Digital World?

Technology Has Let Us Reshape Our Lives,
But With This Revolution Come Regrets

Fascinating article in todays WSJ from Jason Frey

This is the final Real Time column, and I’d like to use it to consider what I see as a dominant theme of our digital age, one that’s emerged again and again in this year’s columns. That theme is this: Wherever possible, we are taking control of our digital lives. When we see Read more

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