boston, concert photos, event planning, marketing, social media, awesomeness

WBUR (via their Twitter account) noted that Alex Beam wrote an article about Twitter in The Boston Globe. I knew it was going to be an amusing read based on the tweet:

“Boston Globe columnist slams Twitter: http://tinyurl.com/5msvs4” (@wbur)

In case you haven’t seen it yet, Twitter is a micro-sharing website where you describe in 140 characters or less what you’re up to. You can send and receive messages via SMS (text messages) on your phone, through Twitter’s website and third-party applications such as Twitterific. If you want to talk “with” someone on Twitter, you add @theirusername to the front of the message and it shows up in the person’s replies tab. This was a feature that was added several months after Twitter first launched in 2006 based upon how people ended up actually using the service. That’s been the consistent story for Twitter — it’s definitely evolved beyond “I’m making an omelet for breakfast” to now include sharing info about late breaking news, making plans with a group of cohorts, etc.

I was one of the first users of Twitter — I signed up in August or September of 2006. (Twitter briefly noted your sign-up date but didn’t keep that tidbit around for very long, for whatever reason.) I wasn’t expecting to really use it much. At the time there weren’t a lot of users and even if there were — who cares what I’m up to?

Fast forward to today and I have 1,877 followers. That’s not the 3930204932 follows (only a slight exaggeration) that people like Robert Scoble or Chris Brogan have — but it’s still a decent number of people who want to receive my brief alerts. For me, the tipping point happened at South by Southwest Interactive in 2007 when a bunch of us used Twitter to quickly make meetup plans. A few months later I was interviewed on CNN talking about using Twitter. They definitely took the “Twitter fan girl” angle on the story but it had a little more depth than Alex Beam’s article in today’s Boston Globe. Probably because CNN talked to both Twitter HQ and its users. Amazing!

I can understand Alex’s initial assessment if he was just a regular Twitter user writing about it on his personal blog. But he’s a journalist who gets paid to write about this stuff. There are a lot of people in the greater Boston area using Twitter and it would not have been that difficult to reach out to a few of us to gather more research about the article. Doing a search for “Boston” currently shows 5,357 users who have Boston noted in their name or location. (That doesn’t count people in the greater Boston area who don’t specifically note Boston as their location. I’m in Watertown, for example.) Journalists have power with their words — many people who aren’t that online savvy will read Alex’s article and dismiss checking out Twitter. I think that’s unfortunate.

If you are on Twitter and want to get alerts about local “Tweetups” — check out @BostonTweeters. You can find and follow me as @Sooz.

(Eric Olson and Frank Gruber, cofounders of TECH cocktail)

Thursday night I attended Eric Olson and Frank Gruber’s TECH cocktail Boston 2 networking event as participant and official event paparazzi. The event took place at Tequila Rain across the street from Fenway Park. My photos from the night’s festivities are over on TECH cocktail’s flickr account. Dig in!

I might not be the next Annie Leibovitz; but I’ve definitely been improving my photo skills in the past year. It’s a fun adventure (and an expensive habit buying new lenses, etc!).

I discovered that Yahoo! News is using two photos (1, 2) I took of John McCain (in 2005 when he spoke at a Harvard Bookstore event) on their presidential campaign page about him. My photos are featured with four other photos posted on Flickr of John McCain.

Above the Flickr photos there’s an Associated Press photo. You’ll know it’s an AP photo because there’s a photo credit at the bottom of it. There are no credits below my photos. The only reference to any sort of credit is “From McCain ‘08 Flickr Photos” noted above the photos.

I double checked the license on these photos and they both have “all rights reserved” — but I’m willing to give Yahoo! the benefit of the doubt since I’ve changed my license a few times and it might have been a variation of a Creative Commons license when they grabbed the photos. At the very least the photos would have an attribution requirement. I looked at one of the other photos featured on the McCain page, and they have a Creative Commons license that requires attribution.

David Fischer and I had a mini-conversation about this on Twitter earlier today. David mentioned:

“@Sooz The lack of credit from Yahoo is disturbing. I’m worried about this Getty Images/Flickr thing and the bill they are pressing in congress.”

I can’t figure out why Flickr (by way of their parent company Yahoo!) would ignore creative commons licenses. What am I missing?

(If you’re wondering why in the world I took photos of John McCain — don’t worry, I’m not a McCain supporter. It was just one of many Harvard Bookstore events I’ve attended over the years.)

Free Shakespeare, the annual summertime project hosted by the Citi Performing Arts Center is back again at the Parkman Bandstand on Boston Common, July 18 through August 3, 2008. I’ve organized a get together for the Sunday, July 27th performance of As You Like It, at 7pm. We’re meeting up at 6pm to grab a spot on the grass. If you’d like to join us, RSVP on the event page I set up at Facebook. If you’re not on Facebook, send me an email.

I missed last year but have made it to several of the Free Shakespeare events in the past. It’s always a lot of fun in that “sit on the grass with friends and a zillion strangers and watch a Shakespeare play” kind of way.

Photo by Steven2005 at Flickr. (From “As You Like it” - Act 2, Scene 1)

I helped my friend Mignon (Ariel King) set up her new website this past weekend. You can check out her excellent poetry at www.MignonAriel.com. One of my favorites is a poem she wrote about our weekend in NYC when we went to see Shoot The Moon play a show at Trash Bar in Brooklyn.

Between Adam’s “Yo, bros” and Sooz’s GPS,
somehow we manage to roll from the Trash Bar
in Brooklyn to the open-windowed 35th floor
of Manhattan—“Man, Vic, Vic, Vic. Check out
the falling stars.”
“On the expressway, Sammy?”

Concert photography cohorts and I plan to get out as many nights as possible in July to take photos at Boston concerts. I’ll be curating it daily throughout July via Exploit Boston. So far I’ve lined up complimentary admission every night in July for participating photographers at the following Boston, Cambridge and Allston music venues: The Middle East Upstairs, The Middle East Downstairs, Church, The Lizard Lounge and Great Scott.

If you’d like to get involved, let me know! I wrote about the photo project at sooz.com previously and you can also sign-up on the event page at Facebook. Obviously this is for people who are (most likely) not pro concert photographers. No one is getting paid for the photos outside of free admission to the club. It’s fun.

Michael created a humorous masterpiece of screenshots from The Big Lebowski movie and added LOLcat style captions: The Big LOLbowski. If you’ve seen the movie, prepare to laugh … for days.

I’m moving to Watertown on July 1st so a friend and I wandered around my new neighborhood and then took a walk through Mount Auburn Cemetery. It is one of the best spots around Boston to take photos. Click on each thumbnail to see a bigger photo or view the slideshow at Flickr.