Dan Gillmor

I’m honored to be giving a keynote talk at Highway Africa, which has become the biggest annual gathering of African journalists and has a strong element of how technology is changing journalism. A key theme this year is citizen journalism.

The conference has some scholarships available for working journalists. A link to the application is here.

Yes, I now have an iPhone. I bought it used — a first-generation model — from a friend who bought the 3G phone.

Now, notice, in the upper left part of the screen what carrier I’m using (in the U.S.).

Yes, it’s T-Mobile, the other major GSM carrier. I used the excellent jailbreak/unlock application from the iPhone Dev Team, and it worked flawlessly.

More about this in upcoming posts…

If this video is to be believed, you can pop popcorn with the signals. Holy crap.

Whoops, it’s not to be believed.

But I still think it’s safer to use a headset.

AP: Dunkin’ Donuts pulls Rachael Ray ad. Dunkin’ Donuts has pulled an online advertisement featuring Rachael Ray after complaints that a fringed black-and-white scarf that the celebrity chef wore in the ad offers symbolic support for Muslim extremism and terrorism.

Just when you think companies can’t be any more cowardly, Dunkin’ Donuts proves they can. Good grief.

The news so far from the Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital conference is Bill Gate’s unintentionally hilarious comment in last night’s show-opening interview, in which he said: “Guys like us avoid monopolies. We like to compete.”

Who knew?

I have a particular disdain for people who park SUVs in spots marked “Compact” — especially when there are bigger spots 50 feet further away.

Here’s my Parking Jerk of the Day, on level 4 of the Yahoo parking garage.

At UC Berkeley’s Journalism School tomorrow evening, there’s a Screening of “Citizen McCaw”:

the new documentary film about the journalism ethics battle and meltdown at the Santa Barbara News Press. The screening will be followed by a panel discussion on the state of journalism with former News Press Editor Jerry Roberts, “Citizen McCaw” director Sam Tyler and San Francisco Chronicle Editorial Page Editor John Diaz, moderated by journalism school professor Cynthia Gorney.

“Meltdown” is an understatement for what has happened at the Santa Barbara newspaper, a once-respected journal that has fallen under harsh times during the Wendy McCaw ownership.

If I were going to be in California tomorrow I’d be at this screening. If you’re in the neighborhood and have the time (and nontrivial but $50 admission going to the legal defense fund of people who were kicked out of the paper), please consider it.

At a conversation site where I spend some time, someone noted a Twitter posting from earlier today — well worth repeating:

“What I like about April Fool’s Day: one day a year we’re asking whether news stories are true. It should be all 365.”

For a number of reasons I’m now using a Blackberry Curve as my main phone. But its email system is beyond dreadful for anyone who’s not locked into a Windows-Outlook-Exchange environment.

Mainly, the Blackberry IMAP connection is pathetic, a kludge that is almost worse than nothing. It doesn’t understand folders. It doesn’t reflect answered messages on the server. All this is because Blackberry pretty much makes you go through its own servers to use email, and because its maker is only seriously interested in working with Exchange.

So I’m looking for an acceptable IMAP mail client for the Blackberry OS, one that connects directly via the Internet to my personal mail server and others. I don’t need fancy, just usable — and I’ll be delighted to pay good money for it.

Send me an email if you know of anything useful.

I hope some of you can join us May 15-16 at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society for the Berkman@10 Conference: The Future of the Internet. This gathering, marking the center’s 10th anniversary, is shaping up to be an extraordinary affair.

As a Berkman Fellow the past several years, I’ve had a chance to spend (not nearly enough) time with some great people who are doing some of the best work on understanding the Net’s already powerful impact on our lives. The May conference will, in part, offer a summary of where we are and where we may be going. As the conference home page asks: “In tracing the trajectory of the past and attempting to lean into the future, what are the contours of the moment we find ourselves in? What are the most important questions that will propel us into the next decade?”

Among the many, many great speakers will be our lunchtime keynoter on Friday, May 16 — someone who’ll need little introduction to regular readers of this blog. He is Joshua Micah Marshall, founder and editor of Talking Points Memo and several related political blogs. What he and his team do each day has become essential reading for people who care about politics and policy, and he recently was honored for his work with a truly high honor in journalism, the George Polk Award.

I’ll have the honor of introducing Josh Marshall. He has been a touchstone for my own work, and has shown one way forward for the journalism “by the people, for the people,” in which I so fervently believe.