When I started this blog, I went looking for other media blogs and found Kent Bye’s Echo Chamber Project. It is a project-oriented blog and I looked through it to get the gist, and admittedly hadn’t checked back. Yesterday I met the very kool Kent Bye at a conference at WNET NY called “Intelligent Television” (I’m throwing that in for giggles…). I was waving the fair use flag for the public media producers and station managers, etc. who were there to discuss a variety of issues that are influencing the future of public media.

I’m missing Kent’s official presentation today because I’m off to Newport. But he approached me because his project involves using clips of major news media online, and he is concerned about the potential rights ramifications. Rightly so. I was having a hard time visualizing the “collaborative investigative filmmaking” so Kent whipped out his iPod to show me and Brian Newman (who is advising the project) a video presentation of how it works - what the interface will look like and how users will interact with it. Sound pretty techy, right? Yes, but oh so awesome!

Bye’s premise, The Echo Chamber, is that leading up to the war rather than reporting on news, the media really became sounding boards for whatever the message of the day is coming from the politicos. Kent talks much more intellegently about it all than I because he’s been reading seriously dense legal materials about the arguments that were going on internationally and interviewing all kinds of folks in the know, who sometimes responded to his questions and other times slickly evaded him. Bye intends on making a feature doc out of his material, but the accompanying website is awesome to behold. It could potentially be a way of engaging the public in discourse that all of these public media-types are looking for. His combination of the new technology for web could also allow his process to be used in other collaborative situations, something akin to “video-Wiki,” which if the text/pic verion of Wiki is any indication, is a successful model of engaging an audience in thought and participation.

Of course, until I saw his visually-aided pitch, I wasn’t quite getting it, and Kent hasn’t been funded likely for the same reason. However, he has lots of information on the process he is creating as well as great clips that get at the intent of the content that will be largely available soon. Check out The Echo Chamber Project, and keep going back!