With potential indictments looming over Washington, here's a video of an edited debate of the different arguments surrounding the Niger uranium claims and pre-war intelligence that is at the center of Fitzgerald's CIA Leak Investigation featuring:

* Greg Mitchell, Editor of Editor & Publisher
* Cliff Kincaid, Accuracy in Media
* John R. MacArthur: Publisher of Harper's Magazine
* Retired Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, Department of Defense Policy Analyst
* Greg Thielmann, Retired State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research

Political junkies are anxiously waiting for the result of Fitzgerald's 22-month invesitigation, and it will be interesting to see whose arguments stand the test of time. These interviews were conducted in July 2004, but the gap between the two perspectives hasn't changed all that much since then.

(5:58 minutes / 14.4 MB)

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Description: I'm getting a lot closer to getting the collaborative editing infrastructure up and running. Here is my follow-up video from the Open Media Summit, with some of my thoughts and future intentions:

* Contact selected participants one-on-one.
* Specify the specific needs of the common ground that we share.
* Record and release the conversations as podcasts to build up the developer community and support network.
* Further specify job descriptions to give to volunteers -- and other action items.
* Promote these conversations to the larger network to recruit programming labor or financial resources.

(2:02 minutes / 4.7 MB)

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Here is the third Echo Chamber Project video blog entry featuring some interviews from the We Media Conference.

Description: Four Big Media executives and consultants talk about how the Internet is affecting the business models of mass media and how it is evolving towards a more participatory and collaborative environment.

Featuring: Tom Curley, Richard Sambrook, Susan Mernit, Merrill Brown and Kent Bye.

(2:53 minutes / 6.7 MB)

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Here is the second Echo Chamber Project video blog entry

Description: Technology is transforming media & politics, and large-scale collaborative media can provide some insights into grassroots leadership and bottom-up democracy.

Featuring: Chris Nolan, Jeff Jarvis, Doc Searls, Scott Heiferman, Markos Moulitsas, Mindy Finn & Kent Bye.

(5:08 minutes / 12.6 MB)

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Listed below is a full transcript of this video with additional links...

Introducing the first Echo Chamber Project video blog entry & vlog!

Description: First vlog episode about an open source, investigative documentary on how the television news became an uncritical echo chamber to the countdown towards war in Iraq -- and proposed tools for collaborative journalism that can provide some solutions.

Featuring: Jay Rosen, Dan Gillmor, Doc Searls, Jonathan Landay, Pamela Hess, Bill Plante, Halley Suitt, Marilyn Schlitz, Kent Bye and 60 others.

To Watch the Video click here -- or on the picture below -- or try here if that link doesn't work. Check back in 10-15 minutes if neither work, the Internet Archive has been a bit spotty.

Sit back, relax and enjoy the show!

(6:15 minutes / 15 MB)
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Listed below is

* A full transcript of this video with additional links
* How to keep informed with the project (Vlog RSS / Blog RSS)
* How to get more involved
* Click here & scroll to the bottom to leave feedback or other comments.

I've been back from a Conference on Consciousness and Healing put on by the Institute of Noetic Sciences for a few days now, but my Internet has been down again preventing me from making too many updates.

My wife and I attended the conference for our personal and professional interests, and I was able to conduct 10 brief stand-up interviews with consciousness researchers, quantum physicists, human rights advocates, Worldview & Values researchers, and leaders from the Complementary & Alternative Medicine movement.

What insights did I gain?

Well, there are actually a lot of parallels between the conflicts between Objective Mainstream Media vs. Subjective Blogs / New Media Technologies and between Objective Mainstream Medicine vs. Subjective Mind-Body Healing techniques.

The conference participants provided a lot of insight for the importance of holistic thinking, being inclusive of many different perspectives, how subjectivity and worldviews filter perception, and the importance of how community and collaboration can be facilitated through relationships and conversation.

I got a lot of great sound bites to flesh some of these ideas out, and I plan on introducing some of the concepts in my videoblog in order to start spreading some of these ideas to a wider audience. I intend for this to help build community and momentum around this project to develop the tools for collaborative citizen videojournalism that makes it both viable and scalable.

Below is a list of the people that I interviewed at the Consciousness & Healing Conference

UPDATE 5-24-06: I have now included the source data for the charts below including term id, term name & frequency

This post is a follow-up to the previous posts here, here and here with more information on an algorithm for automating the font distribution for a Drupal tag cloud. There's also an optional alteration that would evenly distribute the font sizes across a Power Law tag frequency distribution.

I'll step through the details below with the intention of following up with some Drupal developers who will be able to code this up in PHP and provide it to the Drupal community as a module -- most likely this module could be built on top of the tagadelic module.

This has been my first attempt at specifying additional Drupal functionality in preparation for specifying other aspects of my Development Roadmap.

Being able to automatically create tag clouds, personal tag clouds and tag clouds based upon user-specified identities will be a very useful tool for visualizing the subjective context and qualitative opinions that volunteers have about interview sound bites.

My intent is to get this tag cloud development rolling to build momentum for the other aspects of the Phase 01 of my roadmap.

The remaining aspects of this post are pretty technical, but I'll include some graphics below for anyone else interested in following along...

Here is a "tag cloud" for all of the folksonomy tags used so far on EchoChamberProject.com.

You'll see all of the related posts on this site when you click on a tag.

The first tag cloud is ordered by frequency and the second is alphabetized:

New Media | Website | PR | Status | Collaboration | Drupal | Journalism | Transparency | Theory | Decentralization | Echo Chamber Project | Open Source | Film | Blog | Interview | Political | Worldview | Communications | Conference | Folksonomy | Media Criticism | Volunteer | Dialogue | International Law | Rosen | Evolution | Kent Bye | Objectivity | Plante | ToDo | Advisor | Civics | Roadmap | Wilber | About | CivicSpace | Ecosystem | Choice | Murphy | Sociology | ACH | del.icio.us | Intelligence Analysis | Science | Credibility | Distribution | Diversity | Errors | Final Cut Pro | Fundraising | Law | Philosophy of Science | Podcast | Political Bias | Activism | Analysis | CBS | Deception Detection | Editing | History | RSS | Social | Subjectivity | Vlog | ABC | AL Tubes | Economics | FCC | NYT | Sirota | Sundance | Training | Wiki | XML | Borger | Brody | Deliberation | EcoVillage | Identity | LAMP | Lobe | Maine | May | Media Logic | Metaphor | Mitchell | NBC | OHanlon | Psychology | Queen | Software | Spiral Dynamics | Strobel | Sustainability | Transcripts | Brown | Buddhism | Community | Digital Divide | Donnelly | Education | Fair Use | FireANT | Google | Human Rights | KM | Kwiatkowski | Landay | Loiseau | Math | Music | Nature | Schechter | Screencast | Sivaraksa | Skype | Social Capital | Tag Cloud | Thielmann | Thomas | Tiger | Wedgwood |

Below is the alphabetized tag cloud...

I just wrote about the Choice and Freedom that XML provides consumers of products from software giants, and I'll talk a little bit more about some of the implications of being able to export Final Cut Pro projects into an XML format. Right now, a very limited number of Google hits on "Final Cut Pro XML" indicates that there are only a few proprietary software add-ons available to take advantage of this capability.

And what exactly does this amazing XML capability mean? Quoting from Volume IV of Final Cut Pro 5's user manual:

Because Final Cut Pro supports XML, you are no longer limited to creating clips, bins, and sequences within Final Cut Pro. This means you can create your own Final Cut Pro projects outside of Final Cut Pro, using any software or platform you want, as long as you generate a valid Final Cut Pro XML file.

This basically means that I can use an open source content management system like Drupal to collaboratively edit my film.

How? ...

I've written enough theory and have enough of a proof of concept for how I intend to collaboratively produce The Echo Chamber documentary -- I think that it's time to go after some new media grants.

The problem is that I haven't had a lot of time to search for these types of grants.

So here's my first assignment for you -- my dear reader -- poke around online and find of these new media grants. Post some links in the comment section. Wouldn't it be great to submit some grants that were collaboratively produced? Thanks in advance.