Need Your Help: Let's Make Arts Journalism Viral - UPDATES II:

UPDATE: The first blogs are beginning to sign up to stream: www.createquity.com, www.artsDC.com, http://gatheringnote www.seattledances, www.salvadorcastillo.wordpress.com. One blogger has already tried to embed the feed in Blogger and got back an error. Anyone familiar with embedding in Blogger? Leave a note in the comments at the end of this post and we'll figure it out.

UPDATE II: There's a fix [ONLY NEEDED FOR BLOGGER - OTHERS USE THE CODE AT THE END OF THIS POST] Rosie Gaynor at SeattleDances found for the Blogger embed:

 <object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" width="400" height="320" id="utv582837"><param name="flashvars" value="autoplay=false&amp;brand=embed&amp;cid=1470782"/><param name="allowfullscreen" value="true"/><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"/><param name="movie" value="http://www.ustream.tv/flash/live/1/1470782"/><embed flashvars="autoplay=false&amp;brand=embed&amp;cid=1470782" width="400" height="320" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" id="utv582837" name="utv_n_507251" src="http://www.ustream.tv/flash/live/1/1470782" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" />

</embed></object><a href="http://www.ustream.tv/" style="padding: 2px 0px 4px; width: 400px; background: #ffffff; display: block; color: #000000; font-weight: normal; font-size: 10px; text-decoration: underline; text-align: center;" target="_blank">Video chat rooms at Ustream</a>

This Friday - October 2 from 9AM-1PM PDT - we're holding a first ever National Summit on Arts Journalism at USC Annenberg in Los Angeles. We're presenting ten projects in arts journalism from around America, and each we think has something to say about the future of how we cover the arts. It will be in the auditorium of the journalism school in front of an audience of 200, but it's primarily conceived of as a virtual online event. You can read more about it here.

We need your help.

We'll be streaming the Summit from www.najp.org/summit, where you can go to watch and read about what's happening. And comment and Twitter and chat. But why not host your own Summit on your own blog or website? People can come to your website and see the live webcast and participate in the chat. You'll get visitors to your site, and they'll maybe stick around for a while. The point is - we want as many people as possible to see this, and we don't care where they see it.

But it would also help us out. This Summit is a big ambitious experiment. We're trying to start discussions beyond just a one-time conference in a room somewhere. And there are an awful lot of moving parts. There are so many ways the technology can go wrong. There are bandwidth issues, streaming issues and server issues. There's the equivalent of producing a live TV show at Annenberg. There's coordinating all the social media. And there's trying to design an event that actually has something of substance to say. We don't know if it will all work - part of the fun of this is in trying to invent something new and seeing what works. We're learning a lot. A lot.

One thing I do know. Mobilizing large groups around something always makes it better than what just a few can do. Our big choke point in all this right now is the streaming broadcast. If we do it all through one site at najp.org/summit, it's a big load. If that one site freezes or goes down, no one sees the live webcast (not too worry too much - everything is being recorded and we'll be posting it all on UStream and YouTube in addition to the Summit site). But why not spread the bet around?

So we thought - why not ask arts journalists and artists everywhere if they would help out and post the live webcast in their own blogs? It's as easy as embedding a YouTube video in a blog post. If you want to be ambitious, you can even embed the chat and Twitter feeds as well.

Drop us an email before Thursday night, and we'll even publish a list of who's hosting streams. Then - if there are any technical problems on the official site, viewers can look at the list of other webcasting blogs and tune in there.

We don't know how many people will be tuning in on the day itself. We expect most people will watch after the fact, looking at the archived presentations. But the (free) seats for the live audience at USC sold out in a flash. And we've got a least a dozen live satellite events around the country where groups are gathering to watch and discuss.

So I hope you'll join us by tuning in to watch. And if you can, please consider participating in a little piece of history by hosting the webcast on your own blog or website. There are no bandwidth issues for you in hosting - it's being fed from UStream and they pay the bandwidth charges, like YouTube does.

You can see our Ustream channel here http://www.ustream.tv/channel/a-national-summit-on-arts-journalism and you can pick up the embedding code there as well. Or you can copy the embed code below and paste it into your blog - just the way you would embed a YouTube video. Thanks for the help. See you Friday (I hope).

To embed the webcast window in your blog or website paste in this code:

<object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" width="400" height="320" id="utv150969"><param name="flashvars" value="autoplay=false&amp;brand=embed&amp;cid=1470782"/><param name="allowfullscreen" value="true"/><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"/><param name="movie" value="http://www.ustream.tv/flash/live/1/1470782"/><embed flashvars="autoplay=false&amp;brand=embed&amp;cid=1470782" width="400" height="320" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" id="utv150969" name="utv_n_233276" src="http://www.ustream.tv/flash/live/1/1470782" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" /></object><a href="http://www.ustream.tv/" style="padding: 2px 0px 4px; width: 400px; background: #ffffff; display: block; color: #000000; font-weight: normal; font-size: 10px; text-decoration: underline; text-align: center;" target="_blank">Live video by Ustream</a>

If you want to embed the chat as well, paste in this code:

<embed width="563" height="266" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" flashvars="channelId=1470782&brandId=1&channel=#a-national-summit-on-arts-jo&server=chat1.ustream.tv" pluginspage="http://www.adobe.com/go/getflashplayer" src="http://www.ustream.tv/flash/irc.swf" allowfullscreen="true" />

And if you want to host the Twitter feed:

<iframe src="http://www.ustream.tv/twitterjs/iframe?prefix=%40artsj09&suffix=Live+at+http%3A%2F%2Fustre.am%2F6aCi" width="549" height="325" frameborder="0" style="border:0px none transparent"scrolling="no"></iframe>

Thanks everyone. Drop us a note at summitinfo@najp.org if you're going to do this and we'll post a list. Or you can write to me directly at mclennan@artsjournal.com (though if I'm a bit slow in answering I hope you'll understand). See you Friday.