While Burlington’s traditional print media outlets (the daily Burlington Free Press and the alternative weekly Seven Days) are strong and well-written, there are also good online sources of news and information. A huge number of people subscribe to their neighborhood’s Front Porch Forum and voice their opinions through that venue, for instance, and our city government does a fairly good job making information available. There’s local politics weblogs: BurlingtonPol.com, the Vermont Daily Briefing, and She’s Right to name a few. And we have CCTV, our local government-access television channel that also streams live on the web during big events.

It’s no surprise to me that the combination of a strong IT sector and easy access to lots of quality information and debate leads to a vibrant and involved community. This was demonstrated well yesterday on Vermont Town Meeting Day 2009, the day when towns across Vermont hold their town meetings and elections. Last weekend, Bradley Holt of Found Line put together a website to aggregate social media feeds related to this annual Vermont political process. tmdvt.net pulled in content from Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Del.icio.us, and weblogs via Technorati, collecting loads of real-time news and thoughts in one central location. Word of the site spread quickly, and the local news sources joined in, both contributing to the feeds and pulling them onto their own Town Meeting Day news pages.

But beyond the “official” news sources, local community members also took part, tagging their tweets and photos and blog posts appropriately so that they’d show up, and it was their contributions that really made the project take off. By harnessing and encouraging the enthusiasm of the people of Burlington and the rest of Vermont, tmdvt.net instantly became the go-to site for live election coverage. To describe this effect, I’d like to coin the term townsourcing: a localized form of the popular social-web concept of crowdsourcing. I look forward to seeing how it can and will be used more and more to encourage participation in local politics, media, and culture.

Thanks, Bradley, for putting together such a neat experiment, and thanks also to everyone who took part. May next year’s tmdvt be even better!

Today, I watched a video of Cory Doctorow giving a talk about these topics (his favorites) at Google. You can watch on YouTube if you’re interested. It’s an hour long including the Q&A session at the end, but Doctorow is a compelling speaker and it’s a great talk if you care about information freedom and the future of technology. The reason I bring it up, though, is that thirty minutes into his talk (at 30:45, actually), he offhandedly mentions that he’s “doing some consulting on a movie” that Kirby Dick, the creator of “This Film is Not Yet Rated,” is doing.

So I think that, given Doctorow’s involvement, maybe Dick is actually in the process of making that copyright/software patents/DRM documentary that I dreamed up. You heard it here first!

I don’t have a lot of movie-watching time, but I do like to keep on top of the stuff considered really great. Which movie released in 2006 that I haven’t seen do you think is really worth seeing?

Last year, GM lost over $10 billion due to its focus on SUVs and large trucks and disregard for compact cars and trucks. Investors got scared. GMAC, their financing arm, is weakened and about to be partially sold. Their credit rating has been dropping lately, and they’ve been given a negative outlook by investment firms.

So what does GM do to reassure its investors that things will be okay? How do they say “look, we know what’s causing the problems, and we’re going to correct it”? That’s right: by increasing production of its full-size SUVs, the same ones that they haven’t been able to sell for the past year. Good move, GM.

Meanwhile, sales of hybrids continue to climb at an astonishing rate. Ford has realized this; why hasn’t GM?

Soderbergh is taking a novel approach to distributing this movie, one that I’ve thought of in the past: he’s releasing it in theatres, on pay-per-view television, and on DVD all on the same day. His rationale is that movies are already hitting the internet the same day they hit theatres, so why not give people other options than illegally downloading it?

The movie theatres, understandably, are upset. They say giving people these options will decrease their profits. This is potentially true, and I’m curious to see how it goes.

However, occasionally I’ll see a movie in a theatre, and love it so much that I’d be willing to buy the DVD immediately, if it were available. If the movie theatres simply set up a DVD stand in their lobby where you could purchase the DVD of a movie you just saw, at a lower price than in a DVD store, by presenting your ticket stub, I bet lots of moviegoers would take advantage of it.

In any case, bravo to Soderbergh for attempting to tackle the movie-downloading problem through unconventional means. Instead of engaging in pointless lawsuits that have been proven to discourage nobody, this approach is productive and thoughtful, and could help to update the film industry’s business model to compete in today’s high-bandwidth world.

Edit: Mark Cuban, who owns Landmark Theaters (which is the only chain actually showing “Bubble”), agrees with me, but is a much more eloquent guy, so go read his post.

A group of Firefly fans is trying to raise enough money to produce 24 new episodes of Firefly. That’s $24 million, they estimate. While I’d love to see this happen, I somehow just can’t see that kind of money being raised. But if you really love the series, go donate! At the very worst, all the cash donated will end up going to a charity of Joss Whedon’s choosing.

Meanwhile, I’m attempting to learn basic Italian for our upcoming trip. I’ve been using the short lessons at LearnItalianPod.com as well as at the BBC website, and I’ve got a book out of the library to help me.

While watching Sarah play for a few minutes the other day, it struck me that combining these two activities could quite possibly be the best way to learn a new language. When I start learning a language, I find it pretty easy to learn the rules of grammar: how to construct sentences, in what order to place words, how to manipulate endings to form plurals, etc. What I have trouble with is learning enough vocabulary that I would feel comfortable, or at least not totally lost, in all the various situations I might find myself.

Harvest Moon takes your character and has him engage in a large number of common real-life activities: cooking, shopping, ordering food, looking for people, exchanging small-talk, sleeping, cleaning up, and so on. What if, instead of all English, it began the game by replacing a few common words with words in another language. Instead of “bring your milk to this cooler,” it could tell you to bring your latte to the cooler. Instead of picking a flower, you’d pick a fiore. Instead of your cow being hungry, it could be affamata. Slowly, as the game progressed, more and more common terms could be replaced with their foreign equivalents. At some point, new characters could appear who only spoke in Italian, and you’d have to figure out what they’re saying in order to interact. Eventually, all the text in the game could be in Italian, and if the change was gradual enough, over the course, of many dozens of hours of play, the player might not even miss a beat.

This would, I think, work better than other methods, because 1) people love playing videogames, and will gladly do them for hours, even if they don’t necessarily understand all the words, 2) part of playing games is solving puzzles, so players’ brains would just interpret the foreign language as another type of puzzle, and 3) all the words used would be shown in a familiar sort of context, with visual cues to aid in understanding.

Videogames appeal to young and old alike, so this could potentially be a great learning tool for anyone. Kids are naturally more adept at learning languages, too, so it would work even better for them. And the marketing opportunities are tremendous: sell it to videogamers as a game, or to parents or educators as a learning tool.

If you use AudioScrobbler, do you try and show off your good musical tastes and hide your poor ones? Or do you choose to not care, like me, and just listen to whatever strikes your fancy?

I am not going to let oppressive, totalitarian, anti-Christian forces in this country diminish and denigrate the holiday and the celebration. I am not going to let it happen. I’m gonna use all the power that I have on radio and television to bring horror into the world of people who are trying to do that.

My question is: if a terrorist is someone who uses terror to achieve political goals, does this mean Bill O’reilly is a horrorist? Shouldn’t our government be working overtime to eliminate self-proclaimed domestic horrorists? Why haven’t we raised the horror alert level?

Bill’s horrible promise is part of his ongoing War on Decency. He is actively trying to make Christianity look like an oppressive, intolerant, hate-filled philosophy by claiming that Christians (85% of the country, he claims) think anyone who says “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas” is effectively anti-Jesus.

Earlier, Bill said this only applies to America:

They don’t have to say “Merry Christmas” in China, OK? They can say whatever they say in China, “Happy Winter.” All right? “We like pandas.” Say whatever you want.

I think we should let Bill know that we all want him to have a wonderful holiday season this year, no matter what he celebrates. That’s why I’ve created this simple, printable “We Like Pandas!” card that you can print out, fold, add a personal greeting to, and send to him. Click here to download the PDF (275 kb). Once it’s printed, simply trim along the dotted line, then fold the paper in half twice (top-to-bottom, then left-to-right) to make it into a card that will fit nicely into a standard #10 letter envelope. Write a friendly message inside, and send your card to the following address:

Bill O’Reilly
c/o Fox News Channel
1211 Avenue of the Americas, 2nd Floor
New York, NY 10036

Let’s all wish Bill O’Reilly a happy holiday season! Leave a comment here if you send a card — let’s see how many of these he gets!