Save the date! Next Friday, August 14 at 11 a.m., the Spot.Us community will have the chance to talk to the “Garbage Girl,” AKA Lindsey Hoshaw, live on BlogTalkRadio before she leaves for her expedition to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

Lindsey’s pitch about the soupy mass of plastic floating in the North Pacific Gyre has turned a lot of heads and inspired donations from the likes of Pierre Omidyar, Craig Newmark, Tim O’Reilly, Jimmy Whales and Alexis Ohanian, just to name a very few. To top it off,  the New York Times has considered running the finished piece and accompanying photos, igniting an even greater buzz across the web.

Let’s bring all our questions and comments together on one platform Friday August 14 at 11 a.m. to create a community discussion around this exciting journey and historical Spot.us pitch. Wondering what Lindsey has been doing to prepare for the trip? Interested in hearing more about the garbage patch and its impact on human health? Call us at (347) 945-5577 between 11 a.m. and 12 p.m. to learn for yourself.

Get the low down below. This show is not one to be missed!

When: Friday, August 14, 11:00 a.m.

Where: Listen on our BlogTalkRadio page or call in to listen, ask questions and join the conversation

Call-in Number: (347) 945-5577

With the economic depression setting in and the effects of global warming being seen all over the planet, people are having to find ways to employ themselves as well as create cost effective healthy, earth friendly alternatives to expensive fast food and cheap gmo-products. One organization helping guide residents to a more sustainable way of life is the Village Bottom Farm in West Oakland. How is this new “green consciousness” and the existence of the farm affecting a low-income, crime-ridden neighborhood like West Oakland? Tune in to find out from Block Report Radio’s Minister of Information JR, who’s covering the story.

It’s hard to believe that 35 people would show up by 9 am on a Saturday morning to the empty streets of downtown Oakland, but that’s exactly how our day started when we put on our first BEAST Bloggers’ Camp at TechLiminal. It was an incredibly diverse group of people – those who had never blogged, but wanted to blog, to those interested in blog “carnivals“, monetizing and driving traffic, to the “random blog questions” workshop.

Take a look at the video for a quick peak:

East Bay is Pig Latin for Beast, a name that has all the power of bloggers in the SF Bay Area who are the eyes and ears of the East Bay community. In honor of all the East Bay bloggers, Spot.Us, Tech Liminal and BetterOakland are hosting their first BEAST Bloggers Camp on Saturday July 18, 2009 at TechLiminal in downtown Oakland.

A BarCamp is an international network of user generated conferences — open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants.

The day consists of sessions proposed by attendees and the schedule is created on site the morning of the event. BarCamp is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn from each other in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos and interaction from participants.

Free video chat by Ustream

Liveblogging:

Title: Multi-user & community contribution development

Attendees: Michael + Ipsheeta + Ellen + Phil

How to monitor editing? Maybe use wiki but how to directly post

Droople for editing (open source CMS)

Headline & teaser vs. the entire post

Editing platform is needed!

Basecamp wiki is good for brainstorming, chalkboard spaces; i.e. publicpress.wikispaces.com

Google docs – editor monitors stories that is populated by Google Spreadsheet (forms) field on web page for user/writers

see sfengage.org = community engagement effort with discussion form to allow comment for collected story ideas

give buddypress a try for social network functionality

————

On Monday a combination of reporters, editors, and Bay Area residents gathered at the SF Grotto to talk politics. For those curious – that looks something like this.

It was a fantastic event. At the end of the night w reached just above 60% of our goal to raise $5,000.We still have a long way to go – but we made some good inroads. If we reach our goal of 5k by the end of August, both Spot.Us and the Public Press agree to continue our coverage and see how far we can take this ship!

Where is the money going? To the City Budget Watchdog series. You can see some of the work already produced on the Spot.Us pitch or at the Public Press’ project page. And there is a LOT more to come. Even more exciting – this content is available to be republished by any interested parties – as long as credit is given to the writers, Public Press and Spot.Us.

In essence – we’re creating a small wire service for coverage of City Hall here in San Francisco.

And it’s a time when that reporting is sorely needed. Unfortunately my video of the night has been utterly corrupted. Otherwise you’d hear directly from Kevin Stark about how, as the budget season started ramping up, he was one of only a few reporters actually attending city supervisor meetings. Or you’d hear the gumption of Hank Drew as he does video interviews with every city supervisor – something nobody else is doing to get them on record about their decision making process. Or you’d embrace the openness of Michael Pistorio who encouraged folks to leave comments to improve and enrich the teams reporting.

Trust me – this was civic journalism taking shape.

It was also a moment to pause for both the Public Press and Spot.Us to take a look at how far they’ve come. As Michael Stoll noted, we crawled out of the crib together. Through this project both are starting to get recognized as a media force to reckon with.

And then of course there was the beer, wine, food, raffles and socializing. One thing I love about these in-person fundraisers is that it takes the “networking” out of social networking and just makes it fun and real. Spot.Us is about community. So whenever we can, we like to put faces to digital names.

A hearty thanks goes to ALL who came out and showed some love.

You keep us motivated, you give us the courage to step out of our space and leap for something greater than ourselves. There is no way we can truly repay the debt we owe. We hope that by ferociously covering City Hall and the budget cuts being enacted right now we can pay it forward to the larger Bay Area community. If media can move mountains, you are helping to start that avalanche.

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Tonight’s the night to give, drink and talk it up with our City Budget Watchdog team — local journalists who need your support to continue a reporting project on municipal cutbacks, jointly sponsored by The Public Press and Spot.us.

When: Monday, July 13, from 6 to 8 p.m. Where: San Francisco Writers’ Grotto, 490 2nd St., San Francisco, CA

We’ll have plenty of snacks and beverages. Beer provided by Speakeasy Ales and Lagers, and wine provided by Sarah Twitchell of Foster’s Wine Estates Americas.

Raffle items provided by William Cross Wine Merchants and Green Zebra.

Suggested donation: $15 in advance through here or $20 at the door.

If you have already donated to City Budget Watchdog through Spot.us, please come to this event as one of our honored guests.

You’ll have a chance talk to our journalists about the stories they’ve covered so far and hear about the reporting they plan to do in July and August. Read more here.

What is City Budget Watchdog? The Public Press is covering City Hall and San Francisco’s budget crisis – because someone has to do it. Spot.us is leading the campaign to raise money to pay a team of professional journalists to do this important work. We need to raise $5,000 to support this project. The good news is that we’re more than halfway there! We’ve raised $2,725 so far, including a $1,000 matching grant from Ruth Ann Harnisch, president of the Harnisch Foundation in New York. Your contribution will help us reach our goal and support noncommercial, public-interest journalism in San Francisco.

Thanks for your support and see you there!

Spot.us and Public Press

Give, drink and talk it up with our City Budget Watchdog team — local journalists who need your support to continue a reporting project on municipal cutbacks, jointly sponsored by The Public Press and Spot.us.

Update: A keg of beer has been donated by Speakeasy. Free beer and muckraking journalism. Now you have no excuse! (A raffle will be held as well).

You’ll have a chance talk to our journalists about the stories they’ve covered so far and hear about the reporting they plan to do in July and August. Read more here: http://www.public-press.org/san-francisco-city-budget-watchdog).

When: Monday, July 13, from 6 to 8 p.m.
Where: San Francisco Writers’ Grotto, 490 2nd St., San Francisco, CA

Beer, wine and snacks will be made available and we’ll raffle off some gifts from local sponsors.

Suggested donation: $15 in  advance through http://spot.us/pitches/203 or $20 at the door.

If you have  already donated to City Budget Watchdog through Spot.us, please come to this  event as one of our honored guests.

What is City Budget Watchdog?
The Public Press is covering City Hall and San Francisco’s budget crisis – because someone has to do it. Spot.us is leading the campaign to raise money to pay a team of professional journalists to do this important work. We need to raise $5,000 to support this project. The good news is that we’re more than halfway there! We’ve raised $2,710 so far, including a $1,000 matching grant from Ruth Ann Harnisch, president of the Harnisch Foundation in New York. Your contribution will help us reach our goal and support noncommercial, public-interest journalism in San Francisco.

Thanks for your support and see you there!

Three Oakland technology luminaries plotted a BEAST last week.  OK, it was a bit more humble than that, but myself, Anca from Tech Liminal, a technology salon in Oakland, and Echa of A Better Oakland, did actually hop on a call to have our first brain jam on an BEAST Bloggers BarCamp for all East Bay bloggers to come and share skills. It’s been a long time coming since Oakland alone has dozens of blogs and it’s a rare day when they meet up and jam out. So if you want to help, let me know (kara@spot.us) because we’ve started planning our first Barcamp which will be Saturday, July 18 from 9 AM to 5 PM at Tech Liminal at 268 14th Street in Oakland. Here’s what we’re plotting:

(1) Set up the wiki for it here, so we can register and abide by the Camp guidelines.

(2) Create outreach materials (both online and offline) for the event.

(3) Giving out materials to all the bloggers we know. Gather up all our bloggers and journalists gone bloggers and bloggers gone journalists!

(4) We create an Eventbrite and web page.

(5) Network to journalists gone bloggers (David)

(6) Come up with a few sessions to start with and that we can get a few

Core sessions:

Photography and Your Blog (Anca)

Beatblogging, covering your niche (David)

Fact checking

Internet research and strategies for finding information (Echa)

Google Analytics (Anca)

Money and blogs (Erik from AV or Benny Abraham’s blog)

How to share content between multiple blogs (Kaliya?)

Partnerships for money  and working with the the Spot.us model

The SF Gate guy to come over and talk about blog networks

Plugins and Yahoo Pipes

(7) Get donations for food.

(8) Maybe some live entertainment or mixer AFTER the camp? After party venues:

-Van Kleef-

Pacific Coast Brewing Company

-Radio

-Anca is open to other stuff going on in her space.

(9) Show up and host the event!

Rock out!

What’s really wrong with OPD? The reported failings of the Oakland Police Department are serious and well-known. Cops lie to obtain search warrants.

Brass assign detectives with known ties to the suspects they are investigating. On any given day, the department has an absentee rate of 30 percent. Morale is in the cellar. The current chief has taken a leave of absence, and from the outside, it’s not clear who’s running things at 445 7th Street. By interviewing current and former Oakland police officers, Oakland reporter Alex Gronke has been working to understand what’s going on with the Oakland Police, and you can too!

Get a live update about this story from reporter Alex Gronke tomorrow June 12 at 11am on our BlogTalkRadio show or call in to listen and ask questions at (347) 945-5577.

Resident blogger, Serena Renner, and Community Organizer, Kara Andrade, are at WordCamp SF today taking notes and spreading the word about Spot.Us. Check out the notes here.  Here’s a sneak preview from Tim Ferris’, author of 4 Hour Work Week, here:

The important thing is not being a good writer, but having a voice.

To Read More.