Leah Culver on Pownce, a social network for sharing stuff

Leah Culver on Pownce from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

At Supernova last week I caught up with Leah Culver about her way-cool file-sharing tool, called Pownce (at pownce.com). It's a way for friends and co-workers to simply share their digital stuff in a social network environment.

As it happens, Pownce celebrates its one-year birthday — today! I can't make it, but the Pownce birthday party is in San Francisco tonight.

When I interviewed Leah, I got a tweet from  Jason Pontin, editor in chief and publisher of Technology Review, telling Leah thanks for posing for the magazine's July-August cover. It's now out, with a cover story on social networks.

Social Networking Is Not a Business.* Web 2.0--the dream of the user-built, user-centered, user-run Internet--has delivered on just about every promise except profit. Will its most prominent example, social networking, ever make any money?

Here's our 6-minute interview on Vimeo.

And here is a Flickr set of Leah taken from the interview with my Canon HV20 hi-def camcorder.

Hayden Black on 'Goodnight Burbank' and more

'Goodnight Burbank' from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

Here's a 5-minute video interview I did with Hayden Black, the mastermind behind the Internet video comedies Goodnight Burbank and Abigail’s X-Rated Teen Diary. He also stars in both series.

Hayden also offers some tips for anyone who wants to produce webisodes or just a simple series of videos. We spoke at poolside at the Renaissance Hollywood Hotel during the Digital Hollywood conference last month.

Watch video in H.264 on Ourmedia
Watch low-quality Flash version
Watch high-quality Flash on Vimeo

Interestingly, Kara Swisher of All Things D and the Wall Street Journal just did a similar 7-minute video interview with Hayden (though I suspect Kara uses a small video production team to put these up). Contrast and compare (the audio turned out a bit better on mine):

Social Actions

At the NetSquared conference for nonprofits in San Jose on May 27-28, one of the most intriguing projects I heard about was Social Actions, a project to tie together disparate cause movements through an open API that would aggregate information about dozens of different campaigns and allow users to take action to further a cause. "Our mission is to put actions in front of people who are most likely to take part," Peter told me.

It's an ambitious undertaking, and one that ties in with the new direction Ourmedia.org will be taking shortly.

At lunchtime I pulled aside Peter Deitz, founder and project lead, and we spoke on Cisco's campus about where the project is today and where his team will be taking it. (He lives in Montreal; his team is scattered across the U.S.)

Alas, I was paying too much attention to the funky lighting and so didn't do a sound check with the SC HMX10 hi-def camcorder that Samsung graciously loaned me, and I'm embarrassed by the choppy sound quality. The wind was whipping around something fierce.

I need to buy a lavalier mic (aka lapel or tie pin microphone). Any recommendations?

Watch video (in H.264) on Ourmedia
Watch Flash version on Ourmedia

Sarah Lacy on her new book

Sarah Lacy on her new book from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

One of the people I had the best time bonding with on our Innovation Israel trip to Tel Aviv in April was tech journalist Sarah Lacy. Sarah has a new book out: Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good, a narrative-driven look at the rise, fall and resurrection of Silicon Valley's startup culture, from Mark Andreessen to Mark Zuckerberg.

In this 11-minute video interview conducted on a windy beach in Tel Aviv, Sarah talks about startup CEOs and her phenomenal access to get some insidery info about the people driving the Web 2.0 revolution.

This is also the first time I've used the video sharing site Vimeo, which is aiming for producers creating higher-quality works. I liked the experience.

Watch video (in H.264) on Ourmedia
Watch video transcoded to Flash on Ourmedia
Watch video in Flash on Vimeo (they do a better job of transcoding; their embedded Flash player is above)

Pandora: personalized radio

At the Digital Hollywood conference last month I appeared on a panel with Jessica Steel, vice president of business development for Pandora, and afterward she spent a few minutes talking about how Pandora's music recommendation system works.

Pandora is my favorite music site (Last.fm is another), and they're constantly serving up artists that I hadn't heard of and now like. It's all about personalized radio and serendipity.

Here's our 5-minute conversation:

Watch video (H.264) on Ourmedia
Watch in Flash format