Last night was the coming-out party for Socialbrite at the monthly NetTuesday gathering in San Francisco. About 40 people turned out for the event at PariSoMa, the coworking space at Howard and Tenth. Here are a half-dozen shots snapped by organizer Sarah Kennon and me.

And here is what the NetTuesday Meetup members had to say about the event.

A few notes from the evening:

• I kicked things off with a rundown of the Socialbrite team and the resources offered by Socialbrite, including the Sharing Center, Social Media Glossary, Web 2.0 productivity tools, directory of social media reports, guides to free photos, free music and free video footage, and directory of cause organizations.

• Jacob Colker, co-founder of the Extraordinaries, discussed the “micro-volunteer” opportunities using mobile devices in their spare time that people could sign up for. The Extraordinaries is now available as a free iPhone app. Socialbrite will publish a video interview with co-founder Ben Rigby soon.

• Schlomo Rabinowitz sketched out VideoCampSF, coming to BAVC Oct. 16-17. Two days of sessions can be had for just $65. (Register here.) The stellar lineup of instructors includes Melissa Rowley, Jen Myronuk, Katrina Heppler, Sukhjit, Markus Sandy, Adam Quirk and Bill Streeter (hey, I know all these folks!).

• Katrina Heppler outlined her promising new venture, envisionGood.tv. (She’s also begun contributing video dispatches to Socialbrite, like the one immediately below this post.)

• Michael Stoll and two of his staffers came by to fill us in on The Public Press (which will be getting a new domain name next month). The nonprofit publication provides noncommercial news for the Bay Area and has been raising funds for story pitches on Spot.us.

• I outlined the mission of the Public Media Collaborative, a group of Bay Area technologists, activists and bloggers who put on training workshops, chiefly for community organizations. Our next daylong workshop will be Oct. 23 in Oakland.

• Program manager Liberty Smith told us about the National Service Learning Clearinghouse. Service learning is a teaching and learning strategy that integrates meaningful community service with instruction and reflection to enrich the learning experience, teach civic responsibility, and strengthen communities.

It was also great to see Hiroyasu Ichikawa again after meeting him at SoCap09 last week. Ichi, a writer-consultant who’s part of the Japan Social Entrepreneur Forum, recently launched NetTuesday Tokyo, with two meetups of about 30 people so far.

The post Socialbrite’s night at NetTuesday appeared first on Socialbrite.

For the past few weeks, several of us (most notably Kara Andrade) have been working on pulling together what’s shaping up to be an extraordinary end-of-summer event at San Francisco State: Seize the Moment.

I’ll be presenting a Social Media Bootcamp with David Cohn, founder of Spot.us, to kick the morning off on Aug. 28. The all-day event will be geared to ethnic media publishers and feature multiple tracks: a Multimedia Content Bootcamp, a Website Warriors track, a Storytelling Toolkit track, a Business Innovations track and a Social Networking 101 track presented by the Public Media Collaborative (David, Susan Mernit and I are among the co-founders).

Conference details

What: Seize the Moment
Presented by: Renaissance Journalism Center at San Francisco State University and ZeroDivide, in collaboration with New America Media
Agenda: A hands-on educational workshop to help members of the ethnic and community news media learn how to harness new technologies and reach new audiences. In-depth workshops will teach you new media skills and social networking strategies; show you how to grow your Web presence and introduce you to innovative business strategies to help your news outlet navigate through and even thrive in this tough economy. Some participants may want to opt for Nuestra Voz, a day-and-a-half boot camp taught in Spanish.
When: Friday, August 28, 2009
Time: 8:30am – 7:00pm
Location: San Francisco State University College of Extended Learning, 835 Market Street, 6th floor, SF
Registration fee: $25 (are you kidding?)
Facebook group: Join here
Information: info@rjcmedia.org

Bootcamp details

What: Social Media Bootcamp
Presented by: JD Lasica & David Cohn
Description: Like other news publications, ethnic news publications are seeing a steady erosion of readers to online platforms. This session will show you how to use the new tools of engagement — forums, social bookmarking, Twitter, widgets, Facebook and mobile — to reach new audiences, create communities of interest and become relevant to a new generation of users.
Time: 9 am on Aug. 28

Public Media Collaborative

(Susan Mernit, with Jay Rosen, at BlogHer 2005)

I’ve written before about the Public Media Collaborative, which is working with the Renaissance Journalism Center, ZeroDivide and New America Media to put on Seize the Moment , but now’s a good time for a quick recap.

• Back on Jan. 15 I wrote about the first meeting of the PMC, held at TechSoup in San Francisco, where we laid out the goals of creating a digital salon with monthly meetings that center on a particular topic or cause; as a support group with a communication channel to let others know about timely efforts; and as a resource center offering workshops/bootcamps around social and public media. Susan Mernit was the prime mover and shaker behind the group’s formation.

• Amy Gahran chronicled our second meeting, held March 11 in Berkeley.

• On May 1 the Public Media Collaborative presented workshops at Journalism Innovations II put on by Independent Arts & Media.

• And on May 26 we met over dinner in Oakland to discuss next steps with an eye toward working wtih SF State to put on an August event.

Where Socialbrite is more focused on working with nonprofits and social change organizations on social media strategies, on providing resource materials and offering workshops, Public Media Collaborative “strives to be a resource and umbrella for Bay area organizations and individuals, bring people together across disciplines and out of their silos, yet united in agreement that community, discourse, vision and action power positive social change.” Clearly, some overlap, but that’s why we’re collaborating.

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