I’m not entirely sure how I stumbled onto these guys, but I sure am glad I did. This weekend Free Press hosted a the National Conference for Media Reform (NCMR) in St. Paul (St. Paul has got it going on these days!). Since discovering Twitter, I have been looking for cool feeds to follow, and I have become aware of a few folks who started following me. Pretty neat.

I found Free Press website and book marked them in Ma.gnolia back in April, but didn’t think about it much again after that. Admittedly, I get kind of lazy about the websites I save there, just kind of harding them for future reference. And I do refer back to them, but some times it takes me a while. But I digress.

I didn’t think about Free Press again until this weekend when the Twittersphere just lit up with activity from the NCMR conference. I had no idea it was going on, but I started seeing lots of posts with the #ncmr hash tag, and the tweets included interesting quotes from the speeches and panels they were watching, and there was a post for the live feed of the conference, so I decided to check it out.

It was amazing! The likes of Bill Moyers, Dan Rather, Ariana Huffington, Amy Goodman, and Van Jones were all there talking about media’s responsibility to help the public hold politicians accountable, and the necessity of media to stay independent in order to accomplish this.

It was all so inspiring. I’ve been tuning in as I can this entire weekend, in between chores and errands. Bill Moyers address is a must-see, and there is another video of him being accosted by a Fox News reporter that makes me just love Moyers more than I did before. The video is going viral, which is very exciting. Word is getting out!

I highly recommend checking out any of these videos. Lawrence Lessig’s is really good. Van Jones had me clapping and cheering here in my living room (I’ll post later when its uploaded). Dan Rather is just a cool guy. I missed Amy Goodman, but I hope they’ll post her speech soon.

I hope the few friends who read this blog and any who stumble upon it will check some of these out. It made me feel inspired to keep blogging, to keep doing my small part of expressing myself, spreading the encouragement to others to do the same, and to use the new media tools to build a progressive movement and community.