Just add 0.6 to the original calculation and the six points of separation between us and anyone else in the world still holds up.
If you have ever pulled out the ‘Kevin Bacon’ theory or referred to the book by John Guare, this story will appeal. Especially so, if you are into text messaging.
It didn’t get the same dog-eat-dog coverage that Microsoft has been receiving, attempting to acquire Yahoo! Research, unlike Search, isn’t sexy. But we all lean on it one way or another.
The acquisition of JupiterResearch by Forrester Research tells us that in a downturn, especially when things are not looking great for the economy, research matters.
Forrester knows how to make numbers relevant. It reports on things like “Ideas that influence buyers and markets” and all things related to marketing and strategy. To many of us in marketing, Forrester and Jupiter were the archetypal ‘frenemies’ — you liked the fact that they competed hard; there was no either/or.
This comes through from a post by Jupiter analyst, David Schatsky: “We have not always seen things the same way, and we have scoffed at times at some of Forrester’s market forecasts and bold pronouncements on the future. But Forrester has a lot of smart people, and has gotten a lot right. And they have executed their business strategy masterfully.” Frenemy talk.
Interesting fact: Jupiter was in the social media scene long before Forrester. When Forrester’s Charlene Li (who has since left the company) started a blog in 2004, research director David Card had this to say: “But Forrester is about a couple years behind Jupiter Research on the weblog front. Some of the Jupiter analysts have been writing weblogs since 2002.”
“The humidity is really something here, you are dripping of sweat in a few minutes ..I guess i should not be complaining at all about humidity, being from Delhi, India.”
“I suggest someone be kind and bring an Airport Express or other Wifi router and share the Internet love.”
“Beijingoism”
“When I first broached the idea of doing YouTube some people looked at me as though I must have completely lost the plot.”
“Even though I am avidly digital, my devotion is not pure-play. There are six print news and culture magazines entering my household … — and of course the thump of a daily newspaper to my doorstep.”
“Come like you did for Don Bolles; come to Phoenix and stop this madness.”
“You’ll get respect from providing the media what they need, and writing in AP Style is just icing on the cake.”
Google may be capable of finding most of what we want, but it’s still a search tool not a repository. There’s a difference. One’s a magnifying glass. The other is a vessel.
Links get broken as documents are moved, and the most updated version of a person’s presentation may still reside on a flash drive, not her web site.
That’s why I floated the idea of an IABC wiki, to help members and even non-members find communications-related content. I like to hear what you think, even if you are not connected with IABC.
On a related note:
It’s been more than a year since Sun Microsystem’s Jonathan Schwartz complained about the Securities and Exchange Commission being slow to recognize that the Internet exists. He and others lobbied for changes to Regulation FD, a 1934 law about guidance and disclosure to investors.
Why wouldn’t blogs serve the role of a press release, he asked? He put it much better than that:
“we have to hold an anachronistic telephonic conference call, or issue an equivalently anachronistic press release, so that the (not so anachronistic) Wall Street Journal can disseminate the news.”
This week, there was a breakthrough. The SEC’s Special Counsel recommended that the SEC give some leeway with an ‘interpretive release’ so that companies could use web sites and electronic channels to release public information.
Too bad the announcement came via this long, convoluted press release from the SEC. I guess they don’t have someone like Cabinet secretary Mike Leavitt to bring some clarity to this via digital means.
Schwartz hasn’t commented on it yet.
Jeff Jarvis has started a discussion on the new definitions and direction of journalism. In a well organized post, (“The building block of journalism are no longer the article“) talks of the ‘countless grains of information’ being more important than the story or the page.
“Instead, I want a page, a site, a thing that is created, curated, edited, and discussed. It’s a blog that treats a topic as an ongoing and cumulative process of learning, digging, correcting, asking, answering. It’s also a wiki that keeps a snapshot of the latest knowledge and background. It’s an aggregator that provides annotated links to experts, coverage, opinion, perspective, source material. It’s a discussion that doesn’t just blather but that tries to accomplish something (an extension of an article like this one that asks what options there are to bailout a bailout). It’s collaborative and distributed and open but organized”
That’s right, the ‘story’ is being usurped by the elements of a blog, a wiki and linkaggregation.
He spells it out more clearly.
The media have dispatched a new breed of journalists for this Olympics.
The LA Times has sent a team of ten. who also report on the lack of access to certain web sites and blogs from Beijing. “It is hard to imagine why I can get every U.S. newspaper site — but not these blogs,” observes Philip Herch who has been there for just a few days.
The BBC has secured five British Olympians -and promise more to come –to blog at Olympic Diaries.
Sports Illustrated and CNN (FanNation) has one.
NBC has sent four –even Diane Sawyer is listed as a blogger.
And there’s Lenovo, as I mentioned here before, which dispatched blogging-athletes in a unique sponsorship deal. What do we call these professional athletes who are amateurs reporters? Pro-Ams or Am-Pros?
In other news, however, access to an internet connection appears to be restricted and expensive in the Village.
So Proctor and Gamble is doing a McDonald’s? They are inviting 15 so-called “mommy bloggers” to their corporate office.
One of them is MIndy Roberts, a mother of three. She calls her blog, Wonderbelly, a chronicle of “life and children in the sleepless hours in an effort to capture her young family’s world in real time.” Roberts is also the author of Mommy Confidential.
P&G seem to have done their homework in making their pick. “Metropolotal Mama” Stephanie Sheaffer, is another in the group of invitees. She says she works in the PR industry by day and blogs by night.
The Golden Arches did something like this around this time last year. Creating an advisory panel was a good way to counter the kind of flak they were getting from some quarters —and bloggers. Today Blogger Relations is becoming standard PR practice with lots of advice from the pros.
What does this tell us? It signals that bloggers are quickly becoming part of the media mix, rather than a group that only exists on the edges.
A cabinet secretary may not come across as your typical blogger, or PR person. But Mike Leavitt’s blog at the Department of Health and Human Services turns that stereotype on its head.
This morning, he was on a Kaiser Family webcast about why he blogs, how he finds time to do it (answer: sometimes on a stair-master in the gym.) Also how his organization looks at new media exercises like this. Some quotes:
Leavitt was quizzed about moderated comments and the media reading his blog, and it was evident that he is much more interested in the unfiltered voice and format of the blog than being reduced to a sound bite, and being subject to the media filters. It reminded me of Sun Microsystems’ Jonathan Schwarz’s comment some years back that he decided to maintain his own blog because he was tired of being strained through the media filters.
Leavitt was a bit shaky on the audience question about whether he would promote his staffers to blog. (See quote above.) Which was odd for someone who embraces the democratized medium like this, and wants to hold on to the megaphone. That sounds like what a PR department would say.
I took it as a comment that suggests he is still thinking about this. Some blogger would/should take him under his/her wing on that one.
I’ve been tracking how the pandemic flu is being covered over the past few months, and notice a spike in interest across many cities, scary media stories, a military-styled exercise. The blogosphere has suddenly become engaged in this.
Blogging a pandemic I. SDHD PanFlu BlogEx, a blog by the Southeastern District Health Department in Pocatello, Idaho is nothing to sneeze at. It is using a blog format to ‘report’ an outbreak within a two-week period using news-like headlines, fact-filled blog posts, videos and and links to external agencies. I like the fact that comments are open to the public. Every carries this disclaimer in red: “This is an exercise. It is not real.”
Unlike most What-If exercises (considered table-top exercises by the Dept. of Homeland Security) a global event like this cannot be contained by governments and medical professionals. There is a huge public component, not to mention a media component. Information will spread fast through whatever channels are available and it is not a stretch to assume that the blogosphere will upstage the traditional media in the same way it did during recent crises, such as the London bombings and the Asian tsunami. People will upload videos from their phones. Paramedics will provide advice via home made videos published on Youtube. Citizen journalists will break stories from far flung places before Newsweek or Catie Couric even get there –if flights to affected areas will even be possible. This format with potential for greater collaboration and dissemination is truly worth exploring.
Blogging a pandemic II: One Michael Coston, a paramedic, maintains a blog called Avian-Flu diary. He’s onto something, being a sort of a paramedic-meets CitJo.
On similar lines, the Kaiser Network is hosting a web conference called “The Health Blogosphere: What It Means for Policy Debates and Journalism” today at 1 p.m. Eastern time.
ASU fired the first shot? I like to think we had a head start on some of these. Our ‘hybrid’ Pandemic Flu exercise at ASU’s Decision Theater in April this year took the table-top model in a new direction, using the collaboration tools of the Theater with rich media inputs, and scenarios.
Hoipolloireport 