Dan Gillmor's Talk at San Jose State University

I attended Dan Gillmor's talk, put on by the Commonwealth Club. He covered mostly material from his book, We the Media, which I highly recommend. Because I've already been reading the book, I didn't learn much, but got a better understanding of Dan's experience and thought processes. I got to meet Dan and get my new copy of the book signed, though. (I had been reading a gallery proof that I got from the O'Reilly booth at Apple's WWDC...)

(Click on the image for an enlarged photo)

It was interesting to hear Dennis Wilcox, Director of the SJSU School of Journalism ask questions, and it seems that journalism schools and students still don't fully understand the nature of the changes that are happening -- although they may understand the significance. I'm assuming that SJSU is ahead of the curve, since they are here in Silicon Valley and invited Dan to talk. Dan recommended that all journalism students start blogs, but warned them that what they write now may last a long time (think Google cache) and could come back to haunt them. Remember the old saying about being under 30 and not a liberal. You can give liberal either its European or American meaning, but in this context I suppose I mean passionate and idealogical. I know I'd be embarrased to read blog posts that I wrote when I was at Berkeley and had just finished reading Atlas Shrugged, and if I was trying to get a newspaper job today, I'd sure hope my prospective employer wouldn't see them. I decided to try one camcorder-phone video while I was there.

The audio is weak -- he's saying: "More voices have got to be better than fewer, and with that, thank you for coming."

In the last month before the election, there's a lot of pressure to be reduced to just two voices (anti-Bush and anti-Kerry, as it were) and we truly are best served by many voices. Thanks, Dan, for reminding us of that.