The Citizen Media Law Project (CMLP) is jointly affiliated with Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, a research center founded to explore cyberspace, share in its study, and help pioneer its development, and the Center for Citizen Media, an initiative to enhance and expand grassroots media.
CMLP’s interactive database of legal threats contains [...]

I’ve been pretty open and honest about the atGeist.com “experiment” in local portals. Two years ago, we attempted expansion by launching atFishers.comкомпютри which was about 20% successful (80% of what we attempted didn’t meet expectations so we pulled them). I also realized that the older I’m getting, the less patience I have for initiatives that [...]

Our community hosted it’s first Geist Half Marathon & 5K race yesterday, and running it was tough. My feet and legs never got tired. I didn’t even break a sweat. Actually, I’m the president of this great not for profit organization so I was “running” or “managing” the day’s activities which went off flawlessly.
For all [...]

We finally got our first Internet-delivered television show up on GeistTV.com last week. Using a new Canon HDV video camera, Adobe Premiere Elements, and Jumpcut to host and produce the final show, I finally got the prototype show online last week.

The learning curve has been in figuring out whether to edit raw clips via Jumpcut [...]

Some Indiana-based bloggers are organizing the first-ever Blog Indiana Conference on August 16th & 17th at IUPUI in downtown Indianapolis. I’m going to speak on a subject or two, not sure what exactly yet, but I’m game. Blogging has matured quite a bit in the last 10 years, from “online diaries” to “business applications.” We [...]

The best web stats software on the market today is Google Analytics. Why? Because it’s good, doesn’t reside on your server, doesn’t require a licensing agreement, and it’s free!
That’s right, free.
And to help you get started with Google Analytics, they have posted several instructional videos on YouTube.com to help you understand conversions, the role of [...]

The new study showing the value of video ads on quality content sites, finding that consumers are more likely to act on ads they see on media sites, versus portals or user-generated content (UGC) sites, according to Online Publisher’s Association. Over one-third of consumers on magazine (38%), newspaper (37%), and online-only [...]

This is a subject that is near and dear to my heart: community journalism. I seek out websites, blogs, and business models all the time to get ideas on how to make my GeistBlogs.com Network of weblogs better. One I’ve been watching for quite awhile is iCommunity.tv. These guys have it goin’ on!
While I believe [...]

The sun shines a little brighter today.
Today I relaunched my local portal website www.atFishers.com on the new multi-user blog platform WordPress Mu. After over 8 months of tinkering, testing, loading and unloading, and tweaking….I’ve finally launched the future of what I think will be many online communities.
For those of you who have attended my workshops [...]

Newspapers are doing more and more online, but they are losing ground to other online news sources, social networks, and narrower niche websites. According to statistics gathered by Alexa.com (owned by Amazon.com), the largest newspaper websites have all been declining in online rank since January 2006. (see 5-year chart below)

Their page view rank is on [...]