With the emergence of an environment like YouTube, the ability to create and share rich media has gotten really very simple. I’ve written here and elsewhere about the notion of simple creation and even simpler embedding and I think for the most part people are really starting to get it. The idea that I can sit down, point my iSight at my face, and instantly record and encode video straight to the web is really powerful. But if you want to do that as part of the Academy in an official sense the process is much more complicated because we don’t offer the same level of simplicity as...

With the closing of several Google services I’ve been thinking about some of the content I (and a bunch of other people) publish across the social web. So much that I want to get some ideas about what many of you think about it all. If you step back and think about how many new people are joining and actively participating in social networks, one has to consider where we go from here. What do we do to protect the emergence of our meta identities — each crafted in small pieces across many networks. As a simple example, take a look at the emergence of Facebook with adults …...

After last week’s experiment with crowd sourcing the definition for “community” I was curious to see if we could keep the momentum going with a new community question.  This week I am hoping to hear from you as it relates to the concept of “identity.”  This is another one of those terms that we all throw around quite a bit — does it refer to a role you play in a particular social context, is it a mash-up of all the stuff you do on and offline, or is it something all together different?  I’ve written and struggled with this concept in the context of...

Last week I decided to try something very different than what I usually do to engage a group of people.  I sat down and recorded a minute and half video with a Flip Mino HD asking people to define the term “community.”  I posted it to Youtube last Tuesday and I have to say that I am actually overwhelmed by both the responses and the use of video for this purpose.  I’ve created dozens of videos, but I’ve never done the “Hey Youtube, what’s up” variety.  One of the important things I learned … video is very powerful — even talking heads....

I think for the most part we all walk around with a working definition of community … I’m not sure we’re on the same page when using the term, so I was wondering if we could crowd source it.  With that in mind I am hoping we can try to build a shared definition given how much we all toss the term around.  I also wanted to try something a little different … instead of just leaving a comment here, I was hoping we could experiement a little bit in the use of video as a communication medium.  If you’d like to participate, follow the link to the embedded video below...