Quotes for the week, ending 15 August 2009

August 15, 2009August 16, 2009 / Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

“We’ve just had a demonstration of democracy.”

Senator Arlen Specter, after a person attending a town hall meeting shouted at him. The man was escorted out of the room, at a Harrisburg Community College.

“The Obama administration has delivered … a message of tough love. We are not sugarcoating the problems. We’re not shying away from them.”

Secretary Hillary Clinton, summing up her trip to Africa

“The Internet disrupts any industry whose core product can be reduced to ones and zeros ..it is the biggest virgin forest out there”

Jose Ferreira, founder and CEO of education startup Knewton

“Doing sustainability is fine, but being sustainable is where we want to wind up.”

Michelle Bernhart, author of “The Rules of the Game” in an upcoming edition of IABC’s Communication World magazine, interviewed by Natasha Nicholson.

“FriendFeed, in my mind, is the new RSS reader.”

Robert Quigley in Old Media New Tricks

“Macaca Day, for those of us who make our living from video on the Internet and elsewhere, is a holy day – the day that marks the birth of YouTube politics, and reminds us that citizens with cellphone cameras and a YouTube account – or at least an election.”

Dan Manatt, at Tech President, on the infamous comment by senator George Allen during the election campaign

“Google Voice “is merely symptomatic of that larger question.”

Ben Scott, public policy director of Free Press, a Washington-based consumer advocacy group in Washington, on the investigation on whether the carrier (AT&T) and handset maker (Apple) had anything to do with banning Google’s voice application from the iPhone.

“This is a decision based upon consumer experiences, child protection and our strategic investment to build up MSN Messenger.”

Geoff Sutton, GM of MSN Europe, on the decision to shut down Microsoft chat rooms in 28 countries.

Angry mobs or groundswell? Or just paid marketing?

August 10, 2009August 10, 2009 / Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

What do you call a flash mob that has been paid for? Think hard before you answer this.

Now let me complicate it a bit for you:

When connected to a PR campaign, we tend to see it as the evil astro-turfing. Plenty of these examples around us. Those the angry mobs showing up with signs to loudly disrupt town hall meetings as a form of protest against healthcare reform, are suspiciously PR-backed astroturfing practices. TechPresident ‘reveals’ that there is a method behind this madness.

When connected to people protesting against a stolen election, we see it as citizen action —as we saw in Iran . streets

Then there’s the third kind. When connected to marketing, the flash mob could be used to bring attention to a product in a public place. Funny how we have no problem with this, even though it also disrupts civilian life, and appears to be a spontaneous expression of the hoi polloi.

This highly choreographed event earlier this year by Saatchi and Saatchi, for T-mobile at London’s busy Liverpool Street station is a good example of how the lines are being blurred as the radius between sender and receiver gets stretched.

Civic journalism is coming. Get over it!

July 14, 2009July 14, 2009 / Angelo Fernando / 4 Comments

This story gives a new meaning to the term muck raking.

I like the idea of citizen journalism, and have written a lot about it in the past. I even try to practice it a bit, because there are some stories the media will never get to.

Civic journalism is even more interesting, basically community-funded journalism.

So it was interesting to see how the Director of Spot.us have to defend one such project. The site lets people submit ideas for stories and have media companies bid on them –basically fund the reporter. Lindsey Hoshaw, had suggested she could report on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a large amount of garbage that supposedly twice the size of Texas, floating around in the Pacific Ocean.

One reader sniped about the fact that someone was being paid for this, and Cohn had to come back and defend the fact that Hoshaw was being funded.

“The money we are raising is just for travel. That is a real and high expense for this story (it is in the middle of the ocean) – so that is where ALL the money is going. The reporter here isn’t going to pocket it.”

As Cohn rightly observed, such mean-spirited attacks serve no one.

But beyond this, the real issue is the public perception of -indeed, public appetite for — what big media ought to be covering. After seeing the OJ-like dragging on of the Michael Jackson story, my cynical side tells me that people need to wallow in this stuff. But I tend to be more of an optimist. I’ve met journalists who go for the bigger things.

I think we are at a moment where people will support stories not connected to celebrity and partisan politics. Is it better to spend $6k on a story about garbage than a story on a goofy governor? Is it worth our time, their airtime and all those satellite trucks to chase after Jon and Kate? Let’s do a survey on this. I am willing to bet we’ll see a lot more thumbs up.

People will consume what is served up (hence the formulaic stories on ‘Dirty restaurants,’ and ‘scams on Craigs List’) but they are also tuning out, Tivoing past, and canceling their subscriptions for a good reason.

Civic journalism will take time, but it is coming. We better get used to it.

https://hoipolloi.wordpress.com/2009/02/02/phoenix-medias-warm-glow-it-must-be-the-sun/

Wolfram Alpha: Like you need one more search engine!

June 22, 2009June 22, 2009 / Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

I came across a really neat search engine, with an intriguing name of Wolfram|Alpha. It’s been just a month in business!

No, it’s not yet another search engine! (Especially after the hoopla over Bing – basically a re-branding of Microsoft’s un-sexy Live Search.) It’s a darn smart search tool for data-driven questions. The Wolfram Alpha folk call a a knowledge engine.

Why is this geeky search engine so useful?

You can get factual, unbiased answers to queries that involve a range of things from science and demographics to mathematics. It takes some learning how to use the query. You can use it for a veriety of reasons when you are working on reports, proposals, stories, or you just need to feed your brain!

For example:

You need to convert 20 million Italian Lira to US dollars. You simply type in 20,000,000 Lira (or Rupees or Yen) and hit the = sign. It converts it 5 currencies. But that’s not all. You can search a date in history and see data about that particular day.
If you want to compare the populations of Arizona, Texas and Nevada, you need to type ‘population Arizona Texas Nevada” and hit the equal sign —to get this result.
Get more detail demographic data. Let’s say you’re doing a story about people killed in the latest mass protests in Tehran. Type out “life expectancy of females in Iran” and you get some detailed numbers. (In Google, you’d have to sift through 54,000 results)
Check up on a web site by typing in the url. Say I wanted to chec Wikipedia. Using http://www.wikipedia.com gave me this with data about page views, visitors (120 million a day!) etc
Or simple things. You’d be surprised what you can find out about “one cup of water“
Need to find something about a person in history on a specific date – say the Prime Minister of England in 1946

Wolfram|Alpha folk call it “an ambitious, long-term intellectual endeavor” and is never intended to replace Google. But I find it fascinating how a more intelligent algorithm lets us look at information in smarter, specific ways.

Give it a try!

Twitter and the politics of Iran

June 16, 2009 / Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Follow up to my previous post on Iran.

People have devised two ways for people caught in the middle of the crisis to anonymously post to Twitter.

One here.
And another one here.

In related news -related to the perceived power of Twitter over censorship — the State Department apparently asked the folks at Twitter to postpone a scheduled maintenance shutdown. According to this AP report the request was made “to keep information flowing from inside Iran amid the growing crisis over its disputed election.”

Oddly enough, as this is is being posted, Twitter is down for maintenance! On the Twitter blog, they had this to say:

“our network partners at NTT America recognize the role Twitter is currently playing as an important communication tool in Iran. Tonight’s planned maintenance has been rescheduled to tomorrow between 2-3p PST (1:30a in Iran).”

As Andrew Sullivan observed in the Atlantic, The revolution will be Twittered.

Can you really block my voice?

June 16, 2009June 15, 2009 / Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

Q: What might Tehran and Southwest Airlines have in common?

(No, it’s not another ‘peanuts’ joke.)

A: An intolerance with passengers text-chatting online.

Dan York, a tech strategist, author and blogger discovered to his dismay that while Southwest had begun a WiFi Zone on board some of its flights, (and is big on, and well known for using Twitter,) it cut out Skype chat.

But blocking speech at 30,000 feet is the least of our worries in a world that is increasingly intolerant of dissenting voices. It took on a new dimension in Iran this week, in the aftermath of the highly contested elections. The Associated Press reports that the government has stepped up its Internet filtering and Iranians are unable to send text messages from their phones. The Guardian had this to say:

“Mobile phone text messages were jammed, and news and social networking websites – including the Guardian, the BBC and Facebook – as well as pro-Mousavi websites were blocked or difficult to access.”

But can a government really ‘block’ people’s voices in this age of leaky media. While Twitter is being blocked in Iran, some tweets that get through publish the addresses of proxy servers that can be accessed undetected.

Someone uploaded —to Flickr! — this screen capture (left) of tweets found using the hash tag #iranelection.

And then the opposition candidate MirHossein Mousavi has been tweeting, as we know.

Despite all this other forms of technology –including jamming –are being used to circumvent the government clampdown.

Even Arab satellite TV news station Al-Arabiya was shut down.

I don’t think we will see an end to governments trying to curb dissent using intimidation and technology, but these events are unwittingly providing those who favor democratic processes good examples of how best to adapt to the next clampdown, the next autocrat, the next crisis.

Hoipolloireport

Angelo Fernando's blog since 2004

Disruptive

Civic journalism is coming. Get over it!

Twitter and the politics of Iran

Secretary Hillary Clinton, summing up her trip to Africa

Jose Ferreira, founder and CEO of education startup Knewton

Michelle Bernhart, author of “The Rules of the Game” in an upcoming edition of IABC’s Communication World magazine, interviewed by Natasha Nicholson.

Robert Quigley in Old Media New Tricks

Dan Manatt, at Tech President, on the infamous comment by senator George Allen during the election campaign

Ben Scott, public policy director of Free Press, a Washington-based consumer advocacy group in Washington, on the investigation on whether the carrier (AT&T) and handset maker (Apple) had anything to do with banning Google’s voice application from the iPhone.

Geoff Sutton, GM of MSN Europe, on the decision to shut down Microsoft chat rooms in 28 countries.

Britain’s foreign secretary, David Milliband, on the release of one of its embassy staffers in Tehran.One other staffer remains in custody.

Leo LaPorte, about how his podcasting career took off late, being interviewed by his daughter, Abby who started her own podcast, Abbey’s Road.

Paul Fishbein, president of the AVN Media Network, an industry trade publication.

Melissa Chan, an Al Jazeera reporter from XinJiang, via Twitter, after ethnic rioting broke out on in Urumqi, China between the Uighur minority and Han Chinese.

Valeria Maltoni, in a Twinterview with Jason Baer

Josh Bernoff, Groundwell

Chris Anderson, on being accused of plagiarism in his new book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price

Serena Williams’ father on watching his daughter in the semi-finals.

Chris Danielson, director of public relations at the National Foundation of the Blind, commenting on the story that a blind student at Arizona State University filed a complaint against ASU to avoid the use of the reading device until the menus are accessible to blind students.

Jared Cohen, State Department’s policy planning staffer, on taking Silicon Valley companies such as Google, Twitter and other startups to talk to government officials, business people, and students in Iraq

Clive Thompson, on what Twitter is good at creating; quoted by Steven Johnson in a TIME, about how Twitter cwill change the way we live.