Special Olympics Live, a project for which I served as coach and daily video producer, just won two golds in the 2009 Horizon Interactive Awards, in the categories of “public service/non-profit” and “College & University.”
In its 8th year, the Horizon Interactive Awards was created to recognize excellence in interactive media production worldwide. Since 2001, the competition has received many thousands of entries from countries around the world and nearly all 50 US States. Each year, those entries are narrowed down to the best of the best to be recognized and promoted on and international stage for their excellence. The judging process involves a Horizon Interactive Awards advisory panel, end user panel and a worldwide panel of judges consisting of industry professionals. Winning entries are dubbed the “best of the best” in the interactive media industry.
Today was the first day of David Lynch’s Interview Project. Every three days over the next year, the site will feature a new interview with someone found by Lynch’s production team as it drives across the country.
The site has this to say about the project’s first entry:
Jess was our first interview. We found him sitting on the side of the road during the middle of the day. He told us he was waiting for his trailer to be repaired so that he could go live alone in the desert. Although hesitant at first, Jess agreed to spare a bit of his time and talk to us. His rugged delivery and appearance soon gave way to a gentle man who was just looking for some peace in his life.
I had the chance to meet NPR’s new CEO Vivian Schiller a couple weeks ago, when she visited our studios at KQED. In our casual, round table discussion, she touched on the same topic that she discusses in the video below (via Huffington Post). As the former senior vice president and general manager of NYTimes.com explains, there are few working pay models on the web - all of them serving niche markets. For journalism to survive, she argues, it must remain freely accessible and, by extension, searchable.
I am the guitar player, my name is Olle Hemmingson and i live in Sweden. There has been some asking about my guitar, it is a Gibson Les Paul Signature, i bought it used around 1975 and it’s the best guitar I ever had. The bridge is for adjusting the strings in all ways and the strings are locked in the top. There is a movie with “Sweet Georgia Brown” and a one with “Lover come back to me” to[o]. I did not send the movies to YouTube, but it’s fun that people seems to like it.
We just launched a project I’m producing for KQED’s Health Dialogues, called Healthy Ideas: Californians Weigh In on Health Care Reform. We invited about a dozen thought-leaders throughout California to contribute their thoughts on how we should reform health care policy in four categories: the uninsured, eliminating health disparities, improving quality and access, and slowing costs.
The idea is to create a conversation among our authors and the general public, via comments and follow-up posts, that will inform Washington as to what kind of health care reform California wants and needs. The June 18 episode of Health Dialogues will be on the same topic, and will be informed by the online discussion. When the project wraps up on July 1, we’ll deliver a summary of the discussion and ideas to Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus and Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Chairman Edward Kennedy.
So if you’re interested in health care reform, take a few minutes to read through our first round of posts. You can rate posts and leave your comments. Our authors will be contributing new posts every week for the next two months, so make sure to check back again later to follow the evolving conversation.
When you cut into the present, the future leaks out.
Here’s a cool visual cut-up to go along with Burroughs’ “Origin and Theory of the Tape Cut-Ups.” In the recording, Burroughs explains the theory behind his method of rearranging text to make new meaning (or perhaps expose hidden meanings) out of the text. Burroughs finishes with an early example of audio cut-ups, produced by British artist Brion Gysin.
It’s cool to see artists from different eras interacting with each other and exploring the same concepts using vastly different technologies.
The PASS Awards (Prevention for a Safer Society) is the only national recognition of print and broadcast journalists, TV news and feature reporters, producers, writers, and those in film and literature who try to focus America’s attention on our criminal justice, juvenile justice, and child welfare systems in a thoughtful and considered manner.
The show was produced live from San Francisco General Hospital, and featured interviews that I recorded with host Scott Shafer at San Quentin State Prison. The first hour focused on inmate health care, and the second hour focused on juvenile justice and mental health.
German experimental composer Johannes Kreidler took data from plummeting stock values, death tolls in Iraq and other horribly depressing charts, plugged them into Microsoft’s song composition software, Songsmith, and came up with some oddly sanguine music.
