The past couple days have been filled with a flurry of panels and presentations about technology, politics and new media. There’s been so much information flying around, its hard to sort through all the noise. That’s why we were so pleasantly surprised by Kansas State University professor Michael Wesch‘s presentation at the Personal Democracy Forum this morning about YouTube and the new media generation.

As a cultural anthropologist, Wesch examines how YouTube — and social media Web sites like Twitter and Facebook — have made people voyeurs and over-sharers. His entrancing presentation, which included some popular YouTube videos and their tributes, remixes and satires, drew the only standing ovation we saw at PDF.

This afternoon, we sat in on a panel about how the “Internet Ecosystem” can improve journalism — a topic we have ruminated upon ourselves. Moderated by PDF founder Andrew Rasiej, the panel included Frank Rich of The New York Times, Time magazine’s Karen Tumulty, Dan Gillmor of the Center for Citizen Media and NPR’s Scott Simon.

Read more

Citizen journalism, crowdsourcing, interactive news, etc. You hear the buzz-words, but very few mainstream organizations, are experimenting with these new forms of journalism.

The Knight Foundation is out to change all of that. They are giving monetary awards to people who are stepping up to the digital plate.

Read more