We found this remarkably informative image in a blog post over at Gizmodo. It happens to be one of the best examples we’ve seen of why net neutrality is so important.

Tired of waiting for all of the legal and financial issues that are involved with starting a local public access center to get resolved, some Portsmouth, NH citizens took it upon themselves to get the ball rolling online. According to wirenh.com, an online livestream channel was created over beers one evening.

Freund described his vision for an online media venue that would enable him and others to “shine a light on the interesting people from the community, the people that were making a difference, the people that stand out,” Freund said.

As he described the project, Herman buried his face in his laptop and began typing. At first, Freund thought Herman was ignoring him. But soon enough, Herman spun around the screen and displayed what he had created.

“By the end of him describing it, I had made it,” Herman said

What he made was a live community channel on the streaming Internet television platform Livestream. The site is now up at www.shortstream.tv. Freund and Herman view it as the public access channel Portsmouth has been trying in vain to create for the last several years.

Portsmouth has a governmental access channel but public and educational channels have been languishing in start-up limbo for some time. This online venue was a quick, easy and inexpensive way to get things going.

The wirenh.com article doesn’t mention it, but while this is a great way to bypass the hurdles involved in franchise agreements and non-profit start-up paperwork and the expense of starting an actual public access center, it’s important to note that this is not an adequate replacement of such a place. Public access cable channels reach a much more specific and diverse segment of the community than websites can due to the ubiquity of cable TV relative to broadband internet in households. Even in households with both cable and broadband, the cable TV menu of available options is at best a few hundred channels, even with the most robust digital cable service. By comparison, finding locally relevant community media online is much harder, even when an outlet like shortstream.tv exists.

Perhaps more importantly, a community media center is a physical location in the community for citizens to meet and collaborate and learn. Training and equipment are available there, and a knowledgeable staff is invaluable in growing a culture of local media-makers.

It’s fantastic that these Portsmouth citizens took it upon themselves to get the ball rolling, but it would be a shame if an unintended consequence of their efforts was the actual public access channel getting delayed further because of a sense that the community’s public access needs were already being met with the website. They aren’t.

Swiped from an idea by west coast videobloggers Casey McKinnon and Rudy Jahchan, New Media Office Hours is an attempt to bring new-media pros together somewhere out in the world (away from their monitor-lit caves) and get them to interact with members of the public who have questions about filmmaking, videography, digital editing, A/V compression settings, copyright issues, content management systems, how to get good audio, compositing, or anything else that’s even vaguely related to digital A/V media.

In an email, Casey McKinnon described NMOH this way…

New Media Office Hours [is] a way to reach out to new media creators and help answer questions, build the community and work through problems (technical, business, creative, whatever).  In a way, it’s similar to combining the Yahoo Videoblogging Group with the old Apple Store “Meet the Vlogger” events.

It’s especially about building the community. We want content creators of all sorts to come together and network and learn from each other and even to collaborate. If you’re a filmmaker or blogger or radio DJ or podcaster or TV producer — if you produce and/or distribute A/V content of any kind in any medium, this meet-up is for you. No experience necessary — this event is completely n00b-friendly.

So we’d like to officially announce that the first New Media Office Hours (east-coast) gathering will be this coming Monday evening at The Sapa coffeehouse in downtown Burlington at 5:00 P.M. A small group of new-media pros and arm-chair enthusiasts will be on hand to chat with anyone who stops by about whatever is on their mind (related to new-media, that is).

So stop on by on Monday, have some coffee or tea, and talk shop with some new-media folks! Hope to see you there!

Title Graphic for video content produced at the 2009 Alliance for Community Media’s Northeast conference.

A short while ago, nature-lover and VCAM member, Joanna Cummings, approached us with an idea and asked if she could use VCAM’s free public access resources to get her project off the ground. Her idea was to produce a blog “as a means to create social groups interested in sharing their thoughts, activities, videos, photos and knowledge in the areas of Vermont nature, agriculture and the environment.” Joanna indicated to us that she would likely need video production gear to go out into the community and shoot video content, digital editing facilities, a computer with Internet access, a couple different web-design applications, and access to video tutorials to help her get the ball rolling.

As it turns out, VCAM’s new workstation dedicated to web-design (a new iMac equipped with Adobe CS4 Web Premium) along with our video production gear, editing facilities, and subscription to the extensive Lynda.com video tutorial library, were the essential tools for her to get started. Over the last few weeks, Joanna experimented with different templates for her blog, using free web-based applications including Blogger and Ning, before deciding to go with Wordpress. Her goal was to have enough happening on her blog to launch it today, Earth Day 2009, and that she did. Please take a minute to check out Joanna’s new project, leave her a comment or two, and join in the greater conversation about preserving our natural environment by living thoughtfully on the land.