In the days before the launch, I didn't sleep a wink. But this is natural. I was very excited about the launch, and did my best to convey how cool and innovative SochiReporter is to the journalists and students that gathered on launch day in the hall of one of the best schools in Sochi.

Generating Content

We have been working on this project for almost a year, but we started generating content a few months back. At the end of July, we organized a seminar about the web and new media for students in Sochi. We also announced a contest that would give prizes for the best photos, text and video. So between August and October, students were generating content for the site. We provided the students with some nice gadgets to help with their reporting, as well as some basic knowledge about blogging and other skills. This meant we were able to launch with lots of original content.

Site Design and Structure

For me, design is really important. As my designer friend who works for a lifestyle magazine told me, "folks are subconsciously attracted by good design." We had a great time working with four designers from Cetis, which is one of the leading design studios in Russia. I call our design "adrenaline." It's really colorful and bright, and each section has a personal touch. Please take a look and let us know what you think. You can also view a video about the creation of the site:

In terms of the structure of the site, I believe we were innovators. As I understand it, innovation is a process that aims to combine existing tools to create a new product.

We created a section on the site called Time Machine. It enables a user to go back in time to any day (starting from October 2009) and see which material was uploaded. This is basically a way of archiving and storing information, and it's very useful when it comes to sites like ours.

Other innovative sections include the Guidebook, which is a wiki-based virtual guidebook of Sochi. (I wrote the first Russian guidebook of Norway when I was 21, so this section is important to me). I believe that the Guidebook creates a sense of community, and it's a great element for any community-oriented website. In order to create the Guidebook, I made agreements with the publisher of the best travel guidebook for Sochi to provide us with basic travel information. So we're starting with information provided by professional travel writers. Then, as the city changes, users will be able to edit and add to the Guidebook. We already have some local students writing about Sochi's museums.

Marketing

We launched with a major presentation of SochiReporter at the 2009 Russian Internet Week. This is a big web industry exhibition organized in a huge venue in Moscow. It was great to be a part of this expo, and many people were interested in our project. We had a small but comfy stand with walls that were covered with samples from the site.

In Sochi, all of the local television channels covered the launch, as did the online media and some of the local papers. I realized how much the publicity helps when, days after the launch, I was recognized by a waiter in a café. He had seen me on television.

Thanks to our seminars back in July, most of the local journalists had already heard about SochiReporter. This helped create a sense of anticipation for our launch -- and helped make it a success so far. The number of registered users is gradually growing and new stories come up on SochiReporter.

The gathering discussed many global issues, such as the decline of trust in the press, measures of responsibility in journalism, and the social weight of the printed word. There were discussion groups, creativity contests, meetings with politicians, celebrities, scholars, and various workshops held by leading Russian journalists.

One of the highlights of the Forum was the presentation of SochiReporter (www.sochireporter.ru), which is funded by the Knight Foundation. Sochi residents and several local citizen journalists presented our project to the gathering. Visitors could also learn more about us and read related articles at the SochiReporter stand.

Bringing Citizen Journalism to Sochi

On September 26, I led a panel, "Online Media: Citizen Journalism in Russia," which featured six local newspaper and magazine editors:

• Svetlana Handabak, editor-in-chief, City Fresh (a Sochi lifestyle magazine)
• Irina Druzhinina, law reporter, Zakon i Pravo (a local newspaper about law and order)
• Lana Petrosyan, editor-in-chief, Nashe Vremya (a local weekly for young people)
• Eleonora Ervandyan, deputy editor-in-chief, Nashe Vremya
• Anna Petrosyan, culture reporter, Chernomorskaya Zdravnitsa (Sochi's oldest quality paper)
• Alexander Kim, Editor-in-chief, Student (a Sochi student magazine)

Some of the issues raised on the panel included:

• The current information needs of the Sochi residents, and how they changed after July 4, 2007, when Sochi was awarded the Olympics.
• The role of hyper-local news and how it relates to local newspapers.
• The impact of the financial crisis on local media.
• User-generated content and other new sources of news for local newspapers.
• The need to develop citizen journalism in the pre-Olympic city.
• The growing need for additional public Internet access points, and the local government's initiatives to wire the city.

The audience was comprised of representatives of Sochi media outlets and journalists from different parts of Russia, such as the Volga Region, the Urals, and Siberia. They participated in the discussion and commented on the novelty and importance of SochiReporter as a model for the Russian media market. The participants also noted that this is the right time to initiate a discussion about new models, as both Sochi and the industry are undergoing big transformations.

Right now, Sochi is receiving a lot of attention in Russia because of its preparations for the Olympics. The stakes are high for the city, and for SochiReporter.

SochiReporter is getting ready to launch on the web and for mobile users. We spent the last three weeks fixing linguistic, technical and design bugs, all with the goal of maximizing ease of use.

So far we have drawn a fabulous group of people from both local and virtual communities: garage tech geeks and web schizophrenics, coffee-shop amateurs, and folks who want to use the site and offer feedback. Their comments have helped us to get better. We also attracted an avid gamer in Sochi who spends most of his time in an underground Internet café at the center of the city. He first took our Games Section (devoted to the preparation for the Winter Olympics) for a repository of Olympics-themed computer games, which was funny.

We are building the site using Drupal, a great platform. But the biggest challenge at this stage is that Drupal isn't as good at handling languages other than English. So our programmers had to invest a lot of energy into making it take Russian as a default language. In many cases, Drupal was unwilling to accept the correct phrases, and it especially disliked the cases (the correct endings of the Russian numeral adjectives). As for design, it is getting easier at this stage and we recently added magenta as our main color.

If you'd like to learn more about the story of SochiReporter so far, please watch this making-of video. It's about the 100-day process of creating the SochiReporter layouts.

SochiReporter by the numbers

Here are some numbers about our process so far: 7 designers, 11 versions of the logo, 17 pages and 3 backgrounds created, 1048 cups of green tea consumed, 17 nights per designer spent in discussions. We spent so much time discussing things because of the shared enthusiasm for the project, which often took the brainstorming deep into the night.

So, with only a bit of time left before the site is launched, here's an overview of some key details about SochiReporter:

• SochiReporter was a winner of the 2008 Knight News Challenge and is being implemented thanks to the grant from the Knight Foundation.
• SochiReporter is the first ever initiative to build a multimedia archive about the preparation of a host city for the Olympics.
• This is an experiment to help define the future of news. We hope to work out a successful business model as well as the accompanying website that will satisfy the community's information needs.
• This is a project aimed at supporting the Sochi community by enabling citizens to track and debate how the Olympic preparations are changing the city over a five-year period.
• The project will create a repository of multimedia resources and content about the preparation for the Olympics. It will document information that otherwise might be lost or not captured at all.
• The project will create a database of information and content that will be of interest to journalists who come to Sochi in 2014 to cover the Games.
• This project will help improve local traditional media and introduce them and the community to the concept of citizen multimedia journalism.
• The model being developed for SochiReporter will be able to be replicated in any country in the future, whether in connection with the Olympics or other similar grand events.

Just weeks away from launching my Knight News Challenge project, SochiReporter.ru, I organized a seminar for third, fourth and fifth year students from the five leading Sochi-based universities. Thirty-five journalism and IT students participated in the two day seminar called "Web and Journalism: The New Trends." We received press coverage in over 30 online publications, in newspapers and from three of the city's leading TV channels. Clearly, this city, which will host the 2014 Olympic Winter Games, is ready to embrace new ways of reporting and sharing information.

The seminar was held on July 30 and 31 at the peak of the hot Black Sea summer, and at a time when the students are on break from their studies. We invited them to come learn about new media and share their experiences and knowledge. Most of the students turned out to be active web users who already had profiles on the leading Russian social networks. That was a good sign.

Presentation of SochiReporter

On the first day, I gave a lecture about the state of traditional and new media. I also discussed multimedia storytelling principles, demonstrated the difference between a newspaper article and a blog post, and talked about how to choose a topic for a blog, build its audience, and make it successful. The students definitely showed interest in blogging. We also focused on international user-generated content and citizen journalism projects, and the way Web 2.0 is empowering people worldwide.

My session culminated in a multimedia presentation about the SochiReporter project: its concept, structure, design, use of Web 2.0 tools, innovative features, and the opportunities the website offers the citizens of Sochi as they prepare to host the 2014 Winter Olympics.

One goal of the seminar was to let the students, who are the most active web users in Sochi, be the first to learn about the project. We also want to give them the tools and knowledge needed to document and report on the changes in their city. SochiReporter is the first ever initiative to build a multimedia archive about the preparation of a host city for the Olympics. We expect to have many contributions from students.

SochiReporter's First Partners

Joining me as a presenter at the seminar was Sergey A. Stalnov, the director of public relations for Kodak Russia. He gave an exciting lecture on the invention, development and current state of photography in the digital age. One highlight came when we discovered that there was a 12-year-old girl in the hall with us. We presented her with a free camera, much the same way that Kodak did in 1930 when it introduced the Eastman Anniversary camera. To celebrate its 50th anniversary, the company gave away roughly 500,000 cameras to 12 year olds in Canada and the U.S.

After that, each student introduced themselves and shared ideas about how they could contribute to the project. At the end of the first day, the students were given 20 portable HD Kodak Zx1 video cameras (they're waterproof, which is an important feature in a seaside city like Sochi) and 10 voice recorders, all of which were provided by Kodak and Olympus, SochiReporter's first partners. The students chose topics and themes to cover using the new devices and headed out into the field. On the second day, they presented their work. These stories and photographs will be the first content available at SochiReporter when the project launches in September.

The students showed a lot of enthusiasm and seem to be excited about the project. "I acquired new multimedia reporting skills at the seminar," said Artem Shehovtsov, a student at the Sochi Institute of Information Technologies. "I definitely think that SochiReporter is a breakthrough, a really timely project for our city, which is now in constant change. I am anticipating SochiReporter's launch [in order] to start uploading my content."

At the end of the two days, each student was given a certificate commemorating their participation. They also received T-shirts decorated with the project's logo and a few words that I hope they will take to heart: "I am a SochiReporter."

In the early fall 2007, IOC announced the start of the Virtual Olympic Congress with an attractive tagline: "Taking the Pulse. Make your Move. Join the debate. Voice Your Opinion." Generally, the IOC convenes Olympic Congresses at irregular intervals to discuss various topics of concern to the Games; participants are usually limited to IOC representatives. This was the first time in the history of Olympic Congresses that ordinary people could voice their opinions on the subjects of discussion.

In promoting the Virtual Olympic Congress, the IOC also turned to social media marketing and created the 2009 Virtual Olympic Congress Facebook Page. The general public -- excluding employees of the IOC and the National Organizing Committees and the members of the Olympics Family -- were encouraged to submit papers and thoughts on the following suggested main themes, each one having subthemes.

Suggested Themes

Theme 1: The Athletes

1.1 Relationship between the athletes, the clubs, federations and the NOCs
1.2 Health protection in training and competition
1.3 The social and professional life of athletes during and after elite competition

Theme 2: Olympic Games

2.1 How to keep the Games as a premier event?
2.2 Olympic values
2.3 Universality and developing countries

Theme 3: The Structure of the Olympic Movement

3.1 The autonomy of the Olympic Movement
3.2 Good governance and ethics
3.3 The relationships between the Olympic Movement and its stakeholders

Theme 4: Olympism and Youth

4.1 Moving towards an active society
4.2 Is competitive sport still appealing?
4.3 Youth sport events

Theme 5: The Digital Revolution

5.1 A new management of sports rights
5.2 How to increase the size of the sports audience
5.3 Communication with stakeholders in the digital age

And this is how the IOC explains the project at its official website:

Taking the pulse of the Olympic Movement, analyzing its strengths and weaknesses, evaluating the opportunities and the risks it faces: these are the challenges which IOC President Jacques Rogge laid down by convening the next Olympic Congress, which will be held in Copenhagen in October 2009. Since the previous Congress, the Centennial Olympic Congress held in Paris in 1994, the world has changed. While the main concern at the previous Congress was to ensure the integration of all the constituents of the Olympic Movement, the challenge will be quite different in 2009. A guiding concept links all five themes chosen for this Olympic gathering: the role of the Olympic Movement in society and in all regions of the world.

To get a sense of what previous Olympic Congresses have discussed, here are the topics of past meetings (the information comes from the IOC website):

Varna 1973:

Rethinking the idea of amateurism was at the centre of discussion. The new eligibility rule for the Olympic Games authorized the financial and material assistance which had in the meantime become indispensable to elite level training, while only personal profit derived from a sports activity remained prohibited.

Baden-Baden 1981:

Unprecedented attention was devoted to the concerns of the athletes. For the first time, the athletes themselves played a leading role in a Congress. Their accounts rang with an authenticity that nobody dared contradict. The Congress in Baden-Baden thus paved the way for the creation of the IOC Athletes' Commission, which celebrated its 25th anniversary last year.

Paris 1994:

The Congress in Paris proved trend-setting in an area of great interest today: protection of the environment, with the environment declared to be an essential component of Olympism. A survey was conducted, and measures to optimize the Olympic Movement's contribution to preserving the environment were defined.

The Virtual Olympic Congress 2009

The Grand Jury, assembled by the IOC, has been analyzing the citizen contributions and out of over 1,000 submissions, 100 will be selected and used in the Congress proceedings and print materials.

I expect that this will be useful in determining the future of the Olympics. Depending on the outcome, we may see future experiments in democratizing the Games as the IOC adjusts the Olympic brand to a post-Internet world.

The conference was also a good chance for the past Knight News Challenge winners to talk about their progress on their projects. There was a row of special demo stands in the Stata Center lobby as the winners used carton boards, posters, pictures, postcards and various illustrations and graphs to explain their projects.

As a natural matter of course, there was creativity in the air, and the conference provided a platform for new, on-the-fly projects to emerge.

On June 17, the opening day of the conference, Knight's Gary Kebbel announced a competition: The Knight Foundation would award $6,000 in total prize money to the conference attendees who could come up the brightest new ideas over the course of the two days.

The conditions were as follows:

> All projects had to be collaborative, team-based work and teams could not include people who had collaborated before. It would be great if the new team members met each other at the conference for the first time but this was not necessary.

> Proposals should be either brand new ideas or projects that would strengthen or coordinate work between attendees' existing projects.

> On Friday morning, project proposals would each give short talks pitching their projects. Prizes of $3,000, $2,000 and $1,000 would be given to the top three projects as voted by participants.

Surprise Competition

The collaboration competition was a surprise for the conference attendees as it had not been mentioned in the program or on the conference website. And the reactions were lively and funny. Throughout dinner on Thursday and afterwards, and even into the early morning of Friday, you could find duos, trios and larger groups of people gathered around the Stata Center, in the hotel lobby and at the bar counter debating out loud and talking in whispers, giving birth to new projects.

In the morning, the teams presented their projects in the Stata Center grand hall. And it was entertaining indeed. When the presentation was over, the conference attendees lined up in the lobby to vote on the project ideas using Selectricity, a Center for Future Civic Media voting technology using "preferential decision-making" to help small groups and organizations run elections.

Here is how the winners describe their projects:

TweetBill

The Project: TweetBill sends you notification via Twitter when a bill reaches the stage in the U.S. Congress where it's useful for you to call your Congressperson! Sign up, tell us where you live, choose your issues, and you will get a tweet when your representative is slated to vote on a bill, along with the rep's phone number. See the prototype we made last night

Team Members: Nick Allen, Pete Karl, Ryan Mark, Persephone Miel, Aron Pilhofer, Ryan Sholin, Lisa Williams.

Hacks and Hackers

The problem: Scattered through the worlds of journalism and technology live a growing number of professionals interested in developing technology applications that serve the mission of journalism. Technologists are doing more and more things that are journalistic; journalists are doing things that are more and more technological. These people don't have a platform or network through which they can share information, learn from one another or solve each other's problems. These people are scattered in organizations such as IRE, ONA, SND -- and are in both academia and industry.

Proposal: Establish "Hacks and Hackers," a network of people interested in web/digital application development and technology innovation supporting the mission and goals of journalism. This is NOT a new journalism organization (SPJ, ONA, IRE, ASNE, etc.). In fact we would call it a "DIS-organization." The goals of this network are: (a) Create a community of people in different disciplines who are interested in these topics; (b) share useful information (e.g., a tutorial on how to install Drupal); © networking; (d) jobs; (e) professional development; (f) etc.

How this network will work: (a) We will establish an online network that will aggregate and link out to relevant information provided by members; (b) membership costs $0.00; © we will establish a system through which contributions to the network are rewarded -- for instance, via some kind of points system that rewards members for, for instance, solving one another's technical problem or creating a great tutorial; (d) we will seek to build bridges between journalism and academia, generating interest among computer scientists in the problems of journalism and media and among journalists in the opportunities presented by technology.

Team Members: Aron Pilhofer, Rich Gordon.

WordPress Distributed Translation Plug-In

Description: A WordPress plug-in which extracts and divides text and meta-text from blog posts into segments that are delivered to The Extraordinaries smartphone application so that bilingual users can volunteer 5 minutes while waiting in line at the supermarket to help translate news articles and blog posts. The plug-in would also reassemble the translated segments into a single blog post and, optionally, give credit to all involved translators.

Background: Global Voices is the largest volunteer translation community in the world, both in terms of volunteers and the number of working languages. On a daily basis the community translates independent media between Indonesian, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Malagasy, Dutch, Portuguese, Swahili, Serbian, Macedonian, Arabic, Farsi, Bangla, Chinese, Japanese, Hindi, Hebrew, Russian, Albanian, and more. Developing a mobile interface to social translation would allow Global Voices and other organizations to recruit volunteer translators who don't have regular access to a desktop Internet connection.

The Extraordinaries delivers micro-volunteer opportunities to mobile phones and web browsers that can be done on-demand and on-the-spot. Currently available as an iPhone application through Apple's iTunes store, The Extraordinaries enables organizations to connect with their supporters through these micro-volunteer opportunities, strengthening relationships while leveraging their "crowds" to complete real work such as image tagging, translation and research.

Team Members: David Sasaki, Jacob Colker

Congrats to the winners!

The moving map on the screen provokes me thinking about the issue which has recently been topical for me - the map of Sochi. Those last weeks before the conference, I have been talking with several local design studios and private mappers of Sochi about acquiring the maps they have produced. And there is now quite a bunch of various maps of different level of detalization and accomplishment - plain, isometric and 3D.

Finally, at the 2009 ExpoComm exhibition which took place in Moscow last month I met designers from the Russian town of Rostov, who draw maps for Yandex, the leading Russian search engine, and they told me that they had just recently completed the map of Sochi. As their map turned to be great indeed, we decided to use it by just linking to Yandex, without embedding the map into the body of our website. I was tempted by the dainty looking maps created by the talented mappers who were selling them at $700-800, but had to give way to functionality. First of all, Yandex maps are of really high quality, as Yandex updates and improves them regularly, also offering good services. Moreover, Russian web users are familiar with Yandex maps as those are the most popular ones, and by choosing Yandex map we eliminate any chance for confusion in navigating through the map.

Mapping Sochi has recently become a trend among Russian designers. The Olympics inflamed interest for this borderline resort area of Russia, and there is now a demand in high-quality maps of Sochi.

As a matter of fact, Sochi will be the fastest changing region of Russia within next several years, as the city will be transforming to host the Games, and it offers a rich potential for the community mapping efforts. Roads, bridges, railroads, tunnels, harbors, hotels, seaside restaurants and cafes - not to mention Olympic venues - mostly all of them are to be built from scratch. Sochi will in many ways get a new look. Till now, there was no unified structure of the town, as right from Day 1 Sochi was built with no general plan in the minds of architectures. Both in the Soviet times and in new Russia the city was always appreciated by the Russian leaders, who were reshaping the resort, but the Olympic construction is, with no exaggeration, the grandest undertaking, challenge and the change factor that has happened with the city since it was founded.

I'm very excited. I have long been interested in the community development processes and principles. When I was writing the Russian guidebook to Norway and specifically Oslo in 2004, it was all about the community, about focusing on the little details of the community life. And the objective was to make a better guidebook for the members of the community and the readers of it. And this time, with Sochi, it's a similar story. Building a digital platform and experimenting in order to catch a perfect module for keeping a track of and documenting those changes, is an essential part of my project. The idea is to build a database of multimedia/various-format resources mostly generated by the locals (and thus reflecting the community development and bringing the representation of local concerns), and to archive the information, that might otherwise be not recorded or lost, and give open access to it, for the sake of the local population as well as for the good of the global Olympic movement and, consequently, the global humankind.

Big ideas usually concern the lives of ordinary people, so the Olympics are essentially about the lives of locals: it's about how the life of a local milkman, or a tailor, or a teacher of English in the city of Sochi changes with the preparation for the Games. And studying the impact of those preparations on the community is an undertaking which is definitely of interest to many stakeholders, ranging from the IOC members and generally the Olympics industry workers, to federal and local government, to university professors and Olympic Studies experts.

The expectation is that the efforts will result in bringing some new knowledge, based on empirics, on how the Perfect Structure of such a project should look like, what kind of Design elements work best, what Practices in motivating the citizen journalists and reporters and fueling the traffic are.

Systematizing and organizing information is the natural instinct of a homo sapiens. It makes life easier to have information and knowledge catalogued. In the 21st century to be informed means to be digital and to be able to navigate in a virtuoso way through countless thematic clusters that the World Wide Web provides us access to, to build our own clusters, having our say, and to link to the resources which are vital for us - whether those are dedicated to saving leopards, tell about tie knock techniques or teach to master the Argentinean tango.

In the meantime, I have made it to Cambridge, and it's great to be here. And to see again the Knight News Challenge winners in the MIT Stata Center and that familiar guy with the 1965 John Lennon appearance (and he claims that) working at the reception desk in the hotel - precisely as he did last year.

Ms. Boyle is singing a jazz standard and the YouTube Orchestra is playing the Internet Symphony #1 Eroica composed and conducted by the Chinese maestro Tan Dun. Both videos were uploaded to YouTube at the same time, in the middle of April. But 1.1 million views is still an impressive number for this genre, even if we subtract the several hundred thousands of views which belong to the musicians' friends and relatives.

Ms. Boyle's sensational success is explainable: She was a show-biz heroine supported by the British and global television, and her story is based on contrast. Contrast of any kind. It's all clear. But there is so much to discover with YouTube's recent experiment in building the international orchestra: first appealing to the musicians in any wired corner of the world. Then choosing the best performers with the help of the Grand Jury (noted musicians) and ordinary users.

Over 3,000 participants submitted their videos -- and 90 musicians made it to Carnegie Hall. Some were absolutely homemade recordings with dogs barking in the background. Some were recorded in kitchens with boiling tea kettles whistling. A trumpeter performed in a horror-movie plastic mask. And on the stage on 57th street a musician played automobile circular plates.

It has been the most democratic musical contest in the history of music. No language or gender or age barriers and both professional and amateur musicians were allowed to compete. Among the winners were doctors, lawyers, and even a poker player from San Francisco.

The Russian Winners

To musicians in the most remote corners of the world the web is now giving great opportunities to reach out.

"To participate in the contest, there were only three things needed: a computer, a web camera and the ability to play a musical instrument," says Alla Zabrovskaya, PR Director of Google Russia. "And now, after the success of the Orchestra, there is no doubt that any talented person can get famous quickly and at no cost on the web."

There have already been some cases in Russia of stars using YouTube to establish themselves. The singer Peter Nalitch became instantly famous when his 'Guitar' video attracted over 100,000 viewers in April 2007.

I spoke with the Russian winners at CoffeeMania, a café by the P.I. Tchaikovsky Conservatory in the centre of Moscow, which is very popular with musicians and the creative crowd.

"Well, at first I felt a bit uneasy about bringing my recording into the open," said 24-year-old Anna Shumik, a violist and student of the Gnesin Academy of Music. "If my playing wasn't perfect, anyone could hear it. But I risked it and made the recording in the special studio in Moscow (which contracted with Google for the purpose), and uploaded it on YouTube."

Now Shumik is an avid web user: she watches archive rehearsals at YouTube and downloads the music sheets. She says the web gives her great opportunities to find one-time gigs by surfing through the listings. Apart from studying, she works in the Cinematography Symphony Orchestra, which records music for Russian movies, and sometimes plays at weddings.

Alexey Zavgorodnyi, a 23-year-old violinist studying at the Maimonides State Jewish Academy in Moscow, works in a drama theater. Zavgorodnyi admits that before participating in the contest, he wasn't a frequent web user. He had to register at YouTube for the first time to upload the video and asked his friend to help him with mashing the bio-video.

He also helped another participant, Anna Shemyakina, starring in her video as the guy turning the pages while she plays. Back then, Zavgorodnyi couldn't imagine that in four months he would be hosting TV crews that had come to interview him in his home.

"I doubted I would win," he said, smiling, "as I didn't meet the requirements in the second lap. I played none of the pieces which were offered to the musicians by the organizing committee, and performed the cadence at my choice." Well, people at Google appreciated Zavgorodnyi's creativity and audacity. And they might have liked his YouTube profile name -- cdefgahb -- the musical note scale.

Now the young violinist has a Facebook profile, and it's a great way, he said, to communicate with those numerous international musicians whom he met in NYC and with whom he performed at Carnegie Hall on April 15. Before getting to know each other in New York, the winners established a closed online community where they discussed the program and details of the coming concert. Everybody was inspired to meet up; the musicians sounded better offline than in recording, because some of them hadn't used high quality video cameras to film their videos.

Music Breaks Down Language Barriers

The virtual auditioning brought very positive results. Objectively, the most talented players were selected. All the winners -- and those were from countries all over the world, including Romania, Ukraine, China, Hong Kong, Australia, Hungary, etc. -- were high professional. Guided by a virtual conductor on the screen in their homes, empty concert halls, doorways and in the yards by their houses, they all tried to perform at their best.

Shumik and Zavgorodnyi were both born in the Northern part of Russia and had moved to Moscow in their adolescence, as they found out when meeting each other for the first time in Google's Russian office. Last April, they both visited the U.S. for the first time in their lives. Beside having a wonderful tourist experience, they also mastered their performing skills by participating in master-classes.

"We were rehearsing from 10 am to 10 pm," said Zavgorodniy, "Working hard. And there were no language barriers: we speak the same language -- forte, piano, iminuendo, ritenuto..."

All the musicians signed the poster which is now hanging on the wall in the Carnegie Hall.

Both musicians became local celebrities at their colleges and received congratulations from their deans. "In New York we felt we were making history," said Zavgorodniy, "It was also the only concert where spectators were allowed to take pictures."

Back in Moscow, Shumik watches the videos submitted by other violists who participated in the contest. Though they didn't win, she says, it's great to see how different musicians are playing the same musical part. It's like distance learning.

The atmosphere is properly wired. Six panelists representing the leading Russian media outlets are about to report on how social networks are being used by their marketing departments to promote the media products and shape the image of their companies. Represented here are: a magazine, a TV channel, a web content agency, a headhunter agency, a social network, an advertising agency of Livejournal (the most popular blog platform in Russia), and a niche social network focused at writers and poets. This is one of the round-table shows at the Russian Internet Forum and the Internet and Business Conference, a two-headed leading annual Russian meeting of the web industry workers.

About 7,500 participants came to 'Lesniye Dali' resort, a river-and-forest lodging 30 km west from Moscow to raise discussions on various aspects of the present and future of the internet. Usability experts, bloggers, web designers, start-uppers, multimedia journalists, online reporters are walking around: a speckled group of web professionals scattered around 4 halls, libraries and pavilions. Everywhere there were balloons with logos of the Russian internet frontliners - Yandex.ru and Mail.ru - and the e-tourism company organized a questionnaire with an attractive award: a trip to Morocco for the global gathering of bloggers.

Noteworthy, the Program of the Forum and the Conference was arranged in an interesting way. There were actually two types of program: Program and Program 2.0.

The Program was arranged by the organizers - The Regional Public Centre of Internet Technologies (ROCIT) and the Association of Internet and Business (AIB) - to meet the core challenges and aims of the event. It comprised 30 major panel sessions on such issues as:

• the mobile internet (statistics of growth in Russia, peculiarities and prospects of mobile internet advertising);
• the expansion of the domain space in Russia and the coming introduction of the .rf (Russian Federation) zone;
• Runet beyond the Ru zone - in the CIS countries;
• e-Travel and the patterns of selling travel tickets and tours online;
• Enterprise 2.0;
• Maps and Geo-services in Runet: monetization, trends, and forecasts;
• Children in Runet;
• Online media: 10 years. What now?
• Plagiary and piracy in the Web;
• The prospects of video content monetization, etc.

The Program 2.0 was shaped by the participants, who offered their topics on the site of the Forum weeks before the event, and rated each other's topics, commented on them, or expressed their wish to contribute on the topic. In the end, 58 two-hour mini-sessions were selected. Each one had a moderator who originally proposed the topic and then chose 5 or 6 lecturers to cover the specific sub-topics around the issue in question. The sessions were also afterwards rated by the participants on the site. And the Forum was presented and followed on Twitter. It turned out to be quite an effective scheme of building the content of the conference, which enabled people to flock into interest groups and also provided a diverse and timely program for the Forum. It surprised me though that the conference website didn't have the English version.

The Program 2.0 included such sessions as:

• Wikinomics and the power of the public collaboration;
• Twitter: new opportunities for marketing;
• Safety on the web;
• Internet for the disabled;
• Textual content;
• Distance education;
• How to build a dream team for the start-up;
• The copyright issue on the web, etc.
• Brand communities in the social media;

It seemed like there was much stir at the Forum this year around the geo-tagging and e-mapping. And in hyper-local dimension too. In this regard it was very interesting to read David Sasaki's recent overview of the local community projects which started to display information on maps.

I take high interest in the topic, as one of the core ideas of the SochiReporter project, which we are now meticulously preparing for the launch, is to reflect what is going in the resort town that within next several years will be under huge infrastructural change, preparing to host the Olympics. Map interfaces and geo-tagging are an essential component of the project, (which will f.e. have a guidebook) and my team has worked out a special section of the site - or call it 'rubrique' - to serve the task. It will soon be unveiled. But it's a topical issue where to get the detailed interactive map of Sochi. Google doesn't have it yet. And we have to be imaginative in getting the one.

On the Forum I attended the mini-session called: 'Gaps on the e-maps or Where to get the geo-data?' And it was a lively discussion on how to generate more geographic data. Alexey Sobkevitch, the representative of Tele Atlas in Russia, was talking about the 3D map modeling, and how his company turns the aerial images of the European cities, taken by the Norwegian company Blom for Microsoft Visual Earth, into 3D visualizations. Tele Atlas also recruits users to report if they notice any changes in the cities - so that to improve and update the map data. The company receives feedback daily - it's not because their maps are not ideal (they are fine), but 'cause of the fact that people generally started paying more attention to smaller details and changes, as the web fueled their passion for exploring.

Interesting that in many countries 3D modeling is highly regulated. In Russia, for instance, it's not allowed to give the height of the building on maps, as a means of providing anti-terror safety.

The supporters of the UGC-mapping and open source software aired their views on how to make the maps cheaper, the new geo-startuppers said what they lacked to make better products, the owners of the geographic data gave prices, the lawyers informed each and every one on how the Law regulates the relations of the cartography, 3D modeling and the web.

In the evening, driving back to Moscow with a little help of my GPS navigator, I was in my mind organizing the details of this and other discussions. It was a pleasant weight: my car was loaded with dozens of new business cards.

It was a creative spell of life.

First, Sochi Olympics Project actually got a name. Out of a pool of various potential names I have chosen the one which I believe fits best. Needless to say, the decision was made in the Starbucks, where the discussions had previously run.

SochiReporter is the name for the project. There are several things I like about this name:

It sounds clear both in Russian and English - if you write the Russian word 'reporter' (репортер) in Latin, it would be exactly the same as in English - reporter;

The spelling is clear and there are no ambiguous combinations of letters;

'Reporter' is a strong word (this name sounds stronger than just 'Sochi Report', the one I had in mind before) and it is encouraging;

It is neutral in a way that it would fit in in various situations (and the serious media would take it seriously);

It alludes to Hollywood Reporter:)

I have registered domain names both with and without a hyphen (sochireporter and sochi-reporter), in .ru and .com zones. I also registered the so4ireporter and so4i-reporter, because in Russian '4' sometimes substitutes the sound 'ch'. Those domain names were free and I didn't have to contract with the cyber squatters (or domain hoarders, as Benjamin Melancon suggested to call those, commenting on my previous post).

And now please tell me if you think the hyphen should be used in SochiReporter? Are you against or for it? Do you prefer 'www.sochireporter.ru' or 'www.sochi-reporter.com'? I will much appreciate your feedback.

Secondly, progress was made on the visual side of the project. I have been having three or four meetings with the designers weekly. We first talked about general strategies and then went deep into details.

For my project, funded by the Knight Foundation's grant, I contracted with a very good Moscow-based design studio, which has been rocking the Russian market for the last 11 years, and now has representative offices in St. Petersburg and Kiev. Because of the global financial crisis, the number of projects and clients decreased, the fees on the market dropped, and the studio gave me a good price, enabling me to hire those great designer-minds. Their office, located at the former car plant and automobile research institution, is creatively modified into a spacious loft, a website factory. Walls are covered by newspapers commemorating their achievements and accomplishments.

From my past experience in the magazine publishing, I have many talented designers with whom I am regularly having lunch. But this time, I decided to hire someone I don't know personally. I think at times friendship affects business collaboration. At times it's better to start working with someone great but whom you never knew before. Thus you get a moral right to be really demanding.

Our first meeting with the designers was last October. And they liked me (they said they were especially interested in working with me because 'I differed much from those numerous office managers who knock on their doors to build, improve or modify another corporate site'). And they found my project to be a much more creative initiative, with no borders or square heads. I was flattered. I liked them. But I didn't hire them.

Because I was right in the middle of the casting process, and had several meetings with other design studios scheduled. But after days of preliminary talks with very different but stylish types wearing Prada glasses and rosy tartan shirts, after all this, I headed again to the former car plant. And signed an agreement with those first ones. They also wear tartan shirts and heavy black-rimmed glasses, but it's not about their glasses. It's about their vision. Their vision of our web 2.0 product dedicated to the Russian resort town preparing for hosting the Olympics.

For now, we have spent hours of discussions on whether to make a tag cloud vertical or horizontal. And whether to have it at all. And issues like this. And we are working on the site design. There is an email in my outbox from today running 'Approved Front Page Scheme', and the one from yesterday was regarding the whole site content structure. I am much thrilled to see the first design concepts. In two days there will be at least three different styles.

Anticipating.

When I just arrived in NYC as a Fulbrighter from Moscow in September 2007, I first stayed for a couple of weeks in Brooklyn. I took the Q Train from Avenue H to Times Square where the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism is located. It would take me one coke, one donut and 20 pages of 'Convergence Culture' one way. 'Convergence Culture' by Henry Jenkins was the first book I chose out of a wide selection in the CUNY J-School's Library. I had definitely heard about Henry Jenkins before going to the States, but I never read 'Convergence Culture' - the so well-known book, which reveals the improvisation around fandom and pop culture on the web, and it actually became itself an object of fandom for so many readers. I absolutely loved the book and was perusing it. Later I would interview Mr. Jenkins for my dissertation in his MIT campus apartment, but then, in the Q Train, I had yet no idea about it...

I again remembered Mr. Jenkins' book while surfing thru the web and coming across an extravagant group to lobby Futurarama's Dr. Zoidberg for the Symbol of the Sochi Olympics. The group was parked at the social network Vkontakte (which means 'in contact'), the Russian counterpart of Facebook, which has a very similar design, icons and functions.

Let's take a look at the Olympics and the Olympic movement as the mass culture phenomenon, a chance to improvise and express yourself.

'Zoidberg for the Olympics' club is positioned as a 'proposal to the organizers of the Games', tagged as 'Creativity' and categorized as an 'Art and Entertainment' group. There are over 46 000 members in it. And all Zoidberg multimedia relics are here: his famous Woo-Woo-Woo audios and the e-graffiti Z's portraits - the members' contributions. The lobster-alien Dr. John A. Zoidberg, M.D. himself is delicately integrated into the Sochi 2014 logotype.

I wonder if those guys who inspired the movement for Dr. Zoidberg actually submitted their candidate to the Sochi Olympic Organizing Committee when it announced the contest for the emblem. The submissions - most of them relating to the sea, mountains, snow, sports, animals - included various types of bear, a sea gulf, a crab, a mammal, a squirrel with five golden nuts, a snowman and a skiing Santa-Claus, and even five gas tubes arranged as Olympic rings... but it was a skiing dolphin, supported by the majority of voters, which became the winner: you can often see those drifting in hoards in the Black Sea by the shore... The official mascot, according to the algorythm, will be chosen after the Vancouver Games.

It's a good and entertaining idea to promote Dr. Zoidberg for the Olympic emblem, though it's pretty challenging to prove that he is the best one for this role. It looks easier to justify the rights of a dolphin or even a mermaid for the position. So the group admins aspire to be imaginative and inventive to sound convincing. The arguments they bring are as follows:
Dr. Zoidberg 'was born earlier than the Hen and the egg', 'he has cured many people', 'he is so cute'. But he has never been in Sochi yet, so that he doesn't get cold there (like Renée Zellweger's character in the movie 'New in Town'), they introduce an e-questionnaire, asking the members of the group to choose what he should bring with him to Sochi not to freeze. And the possible answers are: a hat, a scarf, a shell, a bottle of vodka (ah...), mittens for pincers...but it's the glove for the nose which is the hit answer... Well, those guys are getting wild.

In contrast, someone creates a group claiming that it's much fairer to declare Olympics as the symbol of Dr. Zoidberg, and not vice versa, cause of Zoidberg is everlasting and perpetual, and the Games are recurrent, just once in two years.

But this way or another, Dr. Zoidberg as a symbol is immensely popular. (Just to add here, other candidates as well found their fans, who also started similar fan groups within the social networks. But while Dr. Zoidberg boasts thousands of fans, the Mammal has only 869, the Beaver - 284, and SpongeBob SquarePants - 223. Another candidate is another mass culture giant - Cthulhu, the mythic octopus-like creature. He has 61 backers only, but this group is a closed community).

Those graphic experiments with the Olympics Symbol are, beyond doubt, a source of inspiration for many amateur designers who improvise and replicate. In one of the pictures Cthulhu is artfully married to Cheburashkah, the star of Soviet cartoons, a Russian analogue of Mickey Mouse. (A red Cheburashkah was, by the way, the real symbol of the Russian team at the Beijing Olympics). It's all fine with the 'Dr. Zoidberg for the Sochi Olympics' fan-club. It's creative and motivating to use imagination. The only thing is that it is actually more about Dr. Zoidberg, by and for his avid fans, and not so much about the Olympics.

As for the Olympics, the IOC is figuring out these days how best and most effectively to use the new media, the web and the digital revolution - not only to keep the reputation of the Olympics as the grandest world event but to further promote this social perception. As known, the 2008 Beijing Games had the largest TV audience ever (4.7 billion TV viewers worldwide), but it was for the first time that certain Olympic moments were officially broadcast on a dedicated YouTube channel in the States (about three hours a day only, but they say the hardcore Olympics fans used the proxy servers to see more on the web).

When the 1980 Moscow Olympics unfolded, I was not around yet. There was no internet as well. The Olympics were extremely important for the Soviet Union, and when the gas balloon Bear - or simply 'Mishka', the symbol of the Games - flew off into the sky on the closing day, tears were pouring from the people's eyes. They wanted the symbol to stay and the Olympic shows to go on. It would be unimaginable back then in 1980 to have a TV cartoon character lobbied - even as a joke - for the Symbol of the Games. But now there is a group of Fans of that Bear. Some suggested Mishka as the symbol of the coming Olympiad again. But this time, they said, the bear should be white and polar as those are winter games.

I think that the most appealing candidate however is no animal, no cartoon or computer game character, but a real person - the teacher of English from a Sochi public school Ms. Sudorova Tamara Sergeyevna, lobbied by her 39 adoring students in a special group 'Sudorova as the Olympics Symbol'. Funny. But if we take a closer look, the teacher's role in the preparations for the Olympics is pretty high: she is basically enabling the younger citizens of Sochi to fluently speak English with the visiting athletes and spectators in 2014. And, though being so different from other candidates, I think Ms. Sudorova should not be undervalued as an unspoken Symbol.

PS Some Chuck Norris fan also suggested the actor to be the symbol of the Games.

In case with Sochi, most of the domain names bearing a word 'sochi' or a combination of words 'Olympic' and 'sochi' were purchased in a wholesale format by cyber squatters several hours after Sochi was named host of 2014 Winter Olympics. The announcement took place in Guatemala City on July 4, 2007, in other words 18 months ago. Since then hundreds of good domain names were registered, which makes it a challenge to get a free one in the .ru web-hemisphere.

I am brainstorming with my friends in the new Starbucks which just opened in the center of Moscow (it's the 7th one, I guess). I asked them to get together for a couple of hours to fountain with ideas. One of them is my friend Liza who went to the Moscow State University Faculty of Journalism with me. She was taking photo classes influenced by her father, a successful photographer. She has recently started a photo-slide web engine to bring great photo projects into the open. And she is here drinking vanilla latte.

Before meeting, at home, I put together a list of 30 domain names and brought them to the table, so that my colleagues can discuss them and give their opinions.

The list of potential names is already pretty long, competing with the number of pastry items in the Starbucks menu which doesn't yet boast magic pecan bars - my faves - but they are expected late January.

For the best domain name we have some unspoken criteria:

It -

- should contain the word 'sochi', so that it pops up in the searches
- should convey the idea of the project
- should be short and memorable

According to the textbooks on web business, it should also 'help to build the brand, add credibility to our business and showcase that we are forward-thinking'.

In other words, a challenge is to find the domain name which will help better market the project for the target audience and create a successful web presence instead of getting lost in cyberspace.

Giving facts, a guy in the domain-registering shop tells me that most of the 4-letter names in the .ru zone are already bought. All 3-letter names are gone long ago. So 5 letters is an option, and it's elevating senses and pretty inspiring as there are 5 letters in the word 'Sochi'. No reason to retreat. I also know that there are some worthy nicks in the .su zone still left, but .su stands for Soviet Union, and this extension is not often seen nowadays.

At this stage of brainstorming any name is fine. We will select the one later. We are passionately debating on the proper names and immediately checking their availability at the www.reg.ru. Three times out of four the name is occupied and I am being forwarded to a cyber squatter who might originate not only from Russia, but virtually from any country. We contact those who own most attractive domain names and ask what prices they would give us.

Generally, the price range is pretty wide: from Euro 2 500 to $ 27 000. Anyone to praise cyber squatters?

Well, I can hardly say who those guys are. It's not always possible to detect them in the 'Who Is' chapters cause a lot of them hide their origins.

I call the Sochi area code number. Peter S. is an amateur cyber squatter whose major occupation is producing pieces of jewelry, but in his spare time he sells domain names. What a character!

I call Marina P. abroad. She introduces herself as 'a cyber squatter who lives between Sochi and London' and adds she would consider making a small discount for some of her domain names.

Another Sochi telephone number. The man on the other end of the line, Andrey, turns out to be a photographer based in Sochi who takes dynamic panoramic photos of the city. Andrey claims that he would not sell his domain name as he bought it for himself and is planning to build a website about his photo studio, illustrated with the picture samples. Anyway it's good to know Andrey, because in the future we can hire him to provide us with some Sochi panoramas to use in creating the site design.

Honestly, I am pretty sure we won't have to buy a domain name from cyber squatters, but would rather generate an original one. However, calling those numbers and talking to those people who own sochi-related domain names is a good way of getting to know more folks who might co-work with me in the future, like Andrey.

Between choosing the domain names and drinking latte, we peer into recently published Taschen almanacs on web design, talk about the introduction of the Pulitzer prize for web-only media journalists, and Ivan shows one of his latest iPhone-taken pictures: the Christmas Tree with the Sochi 2014 logo installed by the Red Square.