NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday conducted an interview with Arianna Huffington and Matt Stoller at the Personal Democracy Forum conference earlier today, and I tagged along to shoot a live mobile stream of it. Here's the archive of the interview:

My notes from Arianna Huffington's talk at the Personal Democracy Forum. -ac

Notes from GOP strategist Chuck DeFeo, in which he invokes John Adams' writings on freedom of the press and how his word are more true than ever before. -andy

Here are my notes from Clay Shirky's presentation at PDF2008 today. Much of the talk was actually inspired by a blog post of mine two years ago about the Belarus Ice Cream Flash Mob. -andy

For those of you wondering why I've been quiet for the last couple of weeks, I was in London with limited Internet access (stupid US phone doesn't work there) and then moved into our new house. I'll talk about the move later, but for now I wanted to share the podcast that was recorded of the event I attended in London, hosted by The Guardian newspaper. The event was part of a two-week series of forums on the future of journalism, and it focused on how real-time publishing tools like live-blogging and Twitter are actually tools for generating conversations journalism and how to make journalism better. It's 90-minutes long, but if you're interested in the subject, it's worth a listen. You can hear it by playing the streaming media file below or downloading the podcast of the event.

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Those of you who are Twitter users like I am are probably just as frustrated with the number of crashes they've been having as of late. It seems like every other time I try accessing the site I'm greeted with their error message - a whale that's being lifted by a flock of birds.

It's gotten so bad, though, that some people are beginning to take it out on the poor whale. For example, my friend Keith Hopper had his own take on the whale art, with his version featuring the aftermath of the whale being dropped by those birds. This got me thinking about depictions of whales in art, which led me to mock up these alternative versions of the Twitter error message:

Seen any other creative interpretations of the Twitter whale? If so, please tag them twitterwhale on Flickr, del.icio.us, technorati, etc so we can follow along. Meanwhile, hopefully Twitter will get its act together and make these crashes a thing of the past, so the poor Twitter whale can fly off with his avian friends in peace and harmony. -andy

Jane Goodall! I Did Not Do This!!, originally uploaded by andycarvin.

Today in the parking lot at the Ikea in College Park, MD, we spotted a car that appeared to be autographed by Jane Goodall just above a busted fender. The signature includes the line "I did not do this!!"

At first I thought it was a joke, but then when I got home I found a couple of Jane Goodall autographs online, and the letters J and G are eerily similar to the signature on the car:

What do you think? Real or fake? -andy

So I was working at my desk yesterday when Weekend Edition Sunday producer Davar Ardalan suddenly appeared with Jacob Soboroff of Why Tuesday?, a nonpartisan group that produces a fascinating video blog about electoral reform. (In case you're wondering about the name, it's based on the question of why on earth U.S. elections are held on a Tuesday, when most people are stuck at work.) Jacob has been participating in Weekend Edition's Sunday Soapbox blog, which features political commentaries from video bloggers and podcasters, and he was in town for some meetings. (He's also headed to a Memorial Day clam bake at Joe Trippi's horse farm; hope he shoots some video while he's there.)

We ended up running across the street to the local Starbucks to grab a drink and enjoy the first tolerably warm temps we've had in a few days. It didn't take long for me to whip out my N95 and record an impromptu interview with Jacob about Why Tuesday? and electoral reform:

It's a good thing I had to work from home today, because otherwise I would have seen Vic Chesnutt play at NPR today.

Okay, that sounds strange, so lemme explain. I'm a big fan of Vic's, ever since helping organize a free concert with him and Bob Mould at Northwestern 15 years ago. Today, though, I got an email just as I arrived home that he'd be playing a few songs at NPR, at Bob Boilen's desk. I was really bummed about missing it, and Jon Foreman twittered that it was a shame he didn't have my Nokia N95 on hand to stream it. So I suggested he set up a Mogulus account on Bob's laptop so I could watch it from home. The result is this live video stream:

It's currently 2:20. Still waiting for Vic to perform. Looking forward to it. -andy

Low-res version of a giant panorama photo I took at DC's Union Station. View the high-res version.

As some of you may know, I've been testing out a Gigapan panorama photo system over the last week, after I received a loaner of their robotic camera mount from Carnegie Mellon's robotics lab. I brought it in to NPR to demonstrate it to colleagues and go on a photo safari to photograph the architecture at Union Station. Apparently, as far as Union Station's security operations are concerned, that's a criminal offense, since we nearly got arrested.

Here's a low-res version of the photo. Click the image to see the extreme high-res, half-a-gigapixel Gigapan version. (Don't worry, it loads dynamically, so don't worry about the size of the pic.)

Dizzy vs the Gigapan, originally uploaded by andycarvin.

I just got my hands on a Gigapan, a robotic camera mount developed by Carnegie Mellon University's robotics lab that allows you to take gigapixel-resolution pictures. And what does Dizzy try to do? Take over the photo shoot. Typical. -andy

Yesterday, I saw a note from the WBUR Twitter account pointing to a blog post about their recent experiments with Twitter. For those of you who don't know WBUR, it's an NPR member station in Boston that's been doing a lot of tinkering in the social media space as of late, so I follow their work pretty closely.

In his blog post, WBUR's Ken George talks about some of their social media projects, and how they're now heading into unknown waters with Twitter:

Now our media giant lumbers head first into the world of Twitter.

After dusting off the mostly dormant WBUR Twitter account, and fortified with copious amounts of coffee, I managed to accrue a modest following (hey its quality, not quantity right?). But in all honesty, I remain uncertain - to the point of apprehension - about what I should "Tweet" about. Do you want WBUR news updates? Irreverent musings? Programming information? Personal trivia? Shout-outs to my peeps? A running chronology of my day?

An excellent example of Twitter's utility is public radio station KPBS using it to receive updates on wildfires then consuming swaths of southern California, information they then could relay over the airwaves. My own personal "ah-ha!" moment came yesterday afternoon when someone Tweeted me about a misspelling on the site. It just then dawned on me that WBUR too now has a potential army of researchers and fact-checkers at its disposal. The cranial cavity expanded six inches yesterday... cue "Also Sprach Zarathustra."

So maybe the right question is: In what ways can we help each other?

Lemme spin that question another way, if I may: What would I expect of WBUR - and any other public broadcaster, for that matter - as far as Twitter is concerned?

One of our favorite things to do when the weather is nice is to take Kayleigh to Wheaton Regional Park, just north of Washington DC, where they have a charming toy train that rides through the park. I thought it would be fun to stream a live tour of the train ride; here's the archive of the video I shot.

Katrina Trailer on Tour, Dupont Circle, originally uploaded by andycarvin.

Photo of a truck driving a trailer around Dupont Circle, protesting Hurricane Katrina recovery efforts.