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The Innovation Journalism program is a Stanford-run initiative that focuses on the business of covering the practice of innovation and forward-thinking societal and industrial events in journalism and the media. Its interesting because it is actually focused on training people on becoming better at identifying and following future trends. The program is run in a fairly elaborate mix of academic workshops, hands-on industrial training and longer-term initiatives in partnership with multiple countries, Pakistan being one of them.

In addition to this, the program engages leaders from traditional and emerging media industries from all over the world on how journalism and media itself is changing (”New media”) and how people can better prepare for news-consumption in the future.

The annual conference is a gathering of the top technology and innovation journalists from all over the world - this year some of the presenters and panelists include Michael Kanellos, Editor-at-Large, CNET News.com, John Markoff, Silicon Valley Correspondent, New York Times, Matt Marshall, Founder and Editor-in-Chief, VentureBeat [See their coverage here], Tony Perkins, Founder, AlwaysOn-Network and other participants from XConomy, DFJ, The Kauffman Foundation, PC World, GigaOM, SF Chronicle, Wired and more.

This year I have been graciously asked to also participate and be on a panel in the conference to discuss “Developing Authenticity in online communities in New Media”. I will be representing Green & White as a publication at the conference.

According to the conference agenda, the other people on the panel are:

• Jeffrey Taylor, Editor and Bureau Chief, Bloomberg San Francisco;
• Ian King, senior correspondent, Bloomberg SFO;
• Osama A. Hashmi, technology blogger ‘Green & White’, Pakistan;
• Peter Magnusson, entrepreneur

The panel is complementing the main presentation on this topic by Mr.Khaleeq Kiani who has been one of this year’s innovation journalism fellows from Pakistan, and otherwise works at Dawn.

Representing new-media and Green & White in a conference like this is quite an honor for me, so thank you to the Innovation Journalism Pakistan program for nominating me.

The InJo Pakistan program - run by the Competitiveness Services Fund - is also taking about 7 more people to the conference to appear in panels or to present. The delegation consists of:

• Mr. Mushtaq Malik - Chairman, PEMRA
• Mr. Amir Jehangir - Special consultant, Innovation Journalism Program at Pakistan
• Mr. Arthur Bayhan - CEO of the Competitiveness Services Fund
• Other leading mainstream journalists

The keynote speaker at the conference this time is Mr. Zafar Siddiqui - Chairman CNBC Arabia, Chairman CNBC Africa, President CNBC Pakistan and President SAMAA TV. He will talk about intellectual freedom and the Internet’s affect on global media organizations.

So if you’re in the San Francisco / bay area and want to meet up, why not come to the conference - its free to attend but you have to register beforehand. Mudassir, Haris, maybe that would be a good place and time to meet.

Also, if you consider yourself a “futurist” and analyzing innovation trends interests you, why not pursue this is a career choice? CDF is currently offering summer Internships on New Media reporting and associate editor roles to very sharp forward-thinking people who are brimming with potential, where I’ll happily provide coaching on technology and innovation coverage and new-media practices. Go here to apply for them today or email me at osama@greenwhite.org.

The picture on the right is the timestamps of Comments on Green & White today. By the time I had saved this picture and loaded up my blog writer 5 more comments had flown in.

The Green & White community is getting better and better every day. We’ve been getting nearly 200 comments / week for the past few weeks consistently, and its amazing to read all the new authors and see people connect with people on interesting discussions. And these arent random opinions or comments… increasingly I’m learning a lot more from the thoughts and ideas and things shared by the people here compared to the blog posts themselves.

Thank you authors, commenters and participants for making Green & White the experience that it is.

As a small token of thanks, now I’ve integrated both G&W posts AND all of the comments directly into a twitter feed so that all of you can follow not just the latest blog posts, but much more importantly the latest comments from everyone in the community here.

The twitter feed to grab is http://twitter.com/greenwhite

You can follow the feed via email or even better SMS alerts on your cellphone - now you’ll never miss something important here.

Haris and Zigron’s team made a very bold and risky move to create a "fun product" PingMyCompany.com, where people can leave anonymous good or bad comments about companies.

Very very risky - people abroad would welcome the idea and respond positively but local companies are likely to miss the joke and try to put some pressure on Zigron.

To be fair - there is likely to be a lot of libel; defamation concerns surrounding this site - right now atleast it seems to be just too easy to go out and pretend to be 50 people who hate a company.

But still - risky marketing also has a good chance of paying off — I have a feeling Zigron’s about to become the talk of the town, for one way or another.

Interesting move Haris! Let’s see how this plays out - whats your thoughts on it? Would you like to see your firm on this?

The growth of internet use and the availability of free information in Pakistan has resulted in the rise of entrepreneurial class. Starting up new businesses or researching on new business ideas can work like a dream on google. Business automation is one of the main worries of any new/old business concern and with this article I would be listing some free or open source softwares that would make your life easy. Read the rest …

So there wasnt a lot of creativity behind the ads I raved about last week after all, I guess.

Anyone see the resemblance in the two ads below?

Zong still gets points for the reasons I mentioned - making it a more transparent, heart-to-heart communication example - but I just wish they’d tried to be original with the visuals of it… just have a guy stand in front of a screen and say the stuff for 5 mins - nothing fancy required!

Prior coverage from Karachi Metroblogs and TM

Apple just launched their first store in Pakistan in Lahore in a partnership with Raffles Computers. The store is called "iRaffles". The US Ambassador to Pakistan inaugrated the "Apple Computers store" last week.

The Unofficial Apple Weblog and Dailytimes have scant details.

They’re not correct in saying that this is the first unofficial Apple store to open in Pakistan - there are many dozens of authorized apple resellers that have sprouted up everywhere in the country and usually have the latest gadget within 3 days of a macworld or other launch event.

Still - does anyone have details or pictures or their experience to share? If so - fire away in the comments.

Thanks Mudassir for the tip!

CNN is fast becoming an exciting news channel to watch - not only are they now beginning to give very focused coverage and many interesting topics from climate change to autism, but they’re also getting very high tech.

I’m late in noting this but I just noticed how well they’ve put to use Jeff Han’s Perspective Pixel multi-touch display during their election coverage. Not only is this fun to watch but gives a much much clearer picture on political activities in the states. The anchors are able to get a lot more information through to the audience in limited time, which boosts business performance for media companies.

Here’s a video I was able to find of their multi-touch display in action. Check it out.

Mansoor just touched on a productivity trick that surprisingly I’ve been using a lot recently as well - he calls it "Selective Amnesia" and I just call it Attention Loadshedding and I was surprised to see that the technique is the same, even if we’re both applying it to different cirumstances.

There is a running joke in my firm and within people who speak to me that I feel like I do "32 hours of work every day" - there is just so many different threads going on all the time that even if I mastered how I click and use the keyboard of my computer (with shortcuts - e.g. clicking an app and before it loads doing 1-2 more things), am able to do 2-3 things at the same time (e.g. listening to someone’s conversation, reading a story and cilcking somewhere else), or racing my mind to stay conscious and in the moment all the time, and even if I spent 24 hours, there are still days when I feel like the work wont get done.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing - I love the work I do, the fact that I’m able to contribute towards the creation of new thought, new ideas, new ways of looking at the world; that my company is at the forefront of all that their doing and that our work can potentially have a pretty strong impact on the markets, cultures or dynamics we cover (e.g. the fact that people tell me that professional blogging in PK started pretty much because of Green & White’s example, which is quite an honor.).

But there is some downsides to doing things that are really meaningful in life - and attention loadshedding is a way of dealing with it. Read on for more details on the trick.

Read the rest …

This is a pretty impressive case study of people harnassing online / offline communities to take action around town - Student’s Blogs is a website + quarterly print publication covering all activities from campuses around the cities and writing about all other things of general interest to students. This started from Lahore it seems but has spread quite quickly to other places as well.

Apparently all student contributions to the magazine come directly from students from different universities. They have taken only 4-6 students per campus but even that becomes a very large list when we spread this over all major campuses in the three major cities. I’m not sure though whether these contributions are just contributions on email or whether they actually have a lot of student blogs present where people write and they package the best stories into the print version. I’m also not even sure if that huge list of contributors actually do contribute considering the overall quality of the content on their publication.

Editing, creative graphics and layout is also done by community members and "staffers" (I dont think any of the staffers are paid writers).

Distribution deals have also been made with all major universities and popular student hang-outs in Lahore. Considering the type of setup and scale, I am guessing they are using interested students from their community of readers itself to do this distribution. According to the site over 15,000 copies are distributed every quarter, but considering that this is a 25+ page publication I have no idea how they are covering printing costs.

Finally, they also have full-page and footer ads running on their magazine which probably just covers the cost of printing and distribution. These ads are also sourced from within their community.

Overall, the publication isnt anything (in its current output form) that can evolve into a syndicated magazine, but its a great community-based effort to see none the less. Good job.

The one major gripe I have with this is this advertising offer from their site.

Alternatively, we can include Branded articles: articles which directly promote the sponsor, but with an interesting angle that is relevant to students. This option is often popular, because it allows students to really engage with the product.

This is unethical - much in the same lines as payperpost.com - unless they clearly declare that this is an article section of the advertiser.

The first droplet on whats next is something I have wanted to do for some time and I’m thrilled to finally get it going.

Back in the summer of 2007, there were a number of posts about Corporate Social Responsibility which attracted a lot of interest among the readers.

Ever since then, I have wanted to really give this subject some dedicated focus on G&W, and explore whats happening in our economy for CSR - what companies are truly making significant inroads on being a responsible part of our society, and which of them are just this as marketing buzzwords? Find out what Social Innovation is, and what its not. Raising questions and awareness about these issues is just as important and "hands-on" as doing social activities themselves - we all have an important role to play, and I’ve really wanted G&W to play a deeper part in societal development.

I’ve spent a long long time finding people who would actually want to have this discussion in the same way we wanted to - an open, democratic, exploratory discussion between all parts of our society - consumers, students, professionals, academics, researchers, government people, NGOs and corporations… we wanted everyone who’s closely involved in CSR thinking or decision making to be a part of this nation-wide discussion.

And I am very very happy that now I have finally been able the find good community members, mentors and panelists, and have also able to find support for this initiative from Telenor, Mishal and a number of other companies behind the scenes to make it happen.

So ladies and gentleman, we’re happy to announce our second major blog under the Green & White umbrella: Social Bridges. I hope it will become just as passionate a discussion and community looking at social responsibility and social innovation as Green & white is for innovation.

Check out my first post there.

I also want to announce the newest member of our team of editors, Waqas Sadiq, who will be leading that initiative along with Ramla Akhtar from the NEXT> and G&W fame. Here is Waqas’s thoughts on the need for Social Bridges.

I hope you will all follow us there and be as participatory to that cause as you have been for Green & White.

If you feel very passionate about SR and want to write on it - Social Bridges is an open blog - anyone can register and start writing today.

Let us know what you all think, and do excuse any initial kinks or hiccups you find on the community.