Here's my Ignite NYC VIII talk. If you don't know what Ignite is: it's a 5 minute talk, with exactly 20 PowerPoint slides, that move automatically every 15 seconds. Whee! You can also check out the slides and notes, and read all about how I prepared for the talk.

(note: You can look at the slides and text here; video will be posted as soon as I get it.)

A week and a half ago, I received an email asking me if I'd be willing to do an Ignite talk for the March 4 NYC event, part of Global Ignite Week. If you're not familiar with Ignite, here's the deal: You have 5 minutes to give your talk; you create a PowerPoint presentation to go with the talk, but here's the kicker: You must do 20 slides, and the slides will advance automatically every 15 seconds. Talk about creative restraint inspiration! Not only is it an amazing challenge and a great place to flex your speaker muscles, but the Ignite platform also reaches far and wide into multiple communities, and can be a huge opportunity to reach lots of audiences with your message. Was I up for it? Sure.

Then the panic set in. Oh my God, what I have I signed myself up for?

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In case you were looking for the lighter side of the State of the Union, you've come to the right place. Sonal and Deanna, while eating pie and playing this drinking game, are here for your entertainment. We'll kick things off around 8pm or so… maybe closer to 8:30 once we figure out the pie situation.

Watch the prez live, courtesy of The Uptake:

And let the silliness ensue:

This was shot in June 2009 in Toronto for GetInvolved. It was a really fun conversation with the producers… I talk about free-for-all organizing, how influence is changing, the importance of authenticity–and I start the first Twitter Anon meeting, to boot.

On Saturday, I gave a the closing keynote talk at Organizing 2.0 here in NYC, a one-day conference designed to bring together labor folks, community organizers and netroots people to work on strategies for integrating online and offline organizing. A fun time was had by all! Here's the video (thank you, Sum of Change!), and below are my notes from the talk.

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As I mentioned on Twitter, it's just getting too hard for many of us to keep track of all the awesome conferences that happen every year. I've missed so many this fall, even ones happening in NYC, just because I hadn't done any curation. Conferences can be a drag, but as a freelancer/consultant/author without a formal organizational structure, they're often where I make the best connections and have the most fun with my colleagues.

So! An early New Year's resolution: I'm gonna try to get on the ball for next year. Already thinking of SXSW, Allied Media Conference, US Social Forum, Personal Democracy Forum, Women Who Tech, America's Future Now, NonProfit 2.0, NTEN and more; what do you recommend in the social tech, media, politics, activism, and social justice fields? Conferences & unconferences, big 'n' small. Leave 'em in the comments (links to conferences would be helpful), and I'll publish a big list in the next few days.

More and more, people are talking about the "attention economy." If you're new to the term, here's the basic idea: Attention is scarce, meaning it's a finite commodity that can be gathered and exhausted. Using economics as a model, we have to choose where we "spend" our attention, and those seeking to gain our attention have to use market-based tactics — a.k.a., "marketing!" aha! — to win us over.

Models like this are very attractive to us as a culture because we're so familiar with transaction-based economies. As I wrote in "Share This!," it's how we think of everything we do. If I pay you $5, you’ll give me a pint of Ben and Jerry’s. If I refinish your flooring, you’ll pay me for my labor. Even when we think of bartering, we still focus on the transactional moment: If I cook you dinner, you’ll show me how to set up a website.

When we apply transactions to how traditional media works (think: one-directional, few-to-many broadcast messages), it's easy to see how we ended up with the dismal state of affairs that exist: reality TV, infotainment news, etc. If, as a producer of content, I need to get the most bang for my buck out of each "transaction," I'm going to create something that will gain the most attention. I'll have to yell the loudest, create the most spectacle. It's not worth my time or money to create niche content that will draw in specific kinds of audiences; partly because this is one-directional, and I have all the control, I can blast people with content and hope for the best out of that transactional moment, when I print an article or air a show. The more outrageous that content is, the better chance I have of at least catching people's eye for a moment — take advantage of humanity's rubbernecking instinct.

As we enter a more social, and perhaps more holistic, way of interacting with the world around us, squeezing our attention span in this kind of transaction-based, market model is turning out to be fraught with problems. First, the transactional moment is more bi-directional (or even multi-directional) than ever. We're having conversations with one another, so it's not just about me producing content and you consuming it. It's about how we interact with what gets put out there, and how that content changes once we start interacting with it.

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