Coke’s move before the the activity ramps up in China next month for the Olympics, includes this wonderful microsite tied to collaboration.
The site and the project is called we8 –uniting 8 of Chinas musicians and design firms with 8 musicians of the West -as the pitch goes.
A very slick site, with a design your own bottle invitation. But what’s up with the eight themes such as optimism and healthy world? By the way, very clever we8 logo, based on east-meets-west.
The gap between the dusty reference book on your desk and the wiki you could pull up on your smart phone is being bridged as Encyclopedia Britannica appears poised to change the game.
I have been tracking wiki development for years, using wikis, and writing about them (here and more recently here), and always wondered why a third player hasn’t emerged. Wikipedia rules the roost, warts and all. It has lodged itself into the lexicon of knowledge. To “Wikipedia” something is to poke around and be somewhat informed. Other encyclopedias have not engaged us as much.
If a third player IS emerging, it’s from within the bowels of Encyclopedia Britannica. Many have been quick to suggest that Britannica is biting the bullet and going all wiki. I think this is too simplistic. Maybe Britannica is responding to pressure and facing up to the reality that on-demand knowledge has to be more collaborative and accessible. But they seem to be moving in new directions, too.
Let’s take Collaboration. Britannica is making a very interesting point of differentiation, because it forces people to look at the back room edit wars that go on in Wikipedia (that Wikipedia calls a ‘breach of wikiquette’) as confrontation, not collaboration. Britannica plans to put contributors in touch with its ‘community of scholars’ and still allow individuals to retain control of their work.
Access. As far as following Wikipedia’s open source model, access isn’t the only value up for grabs–it’s accuracy. Britannica puts it this way:
Encyclopaedia Britannica itself will continue to be edited according to the most rigorous standards and will bear the imprimatur “Britannica Checked” to distinguish it from material on the site for which Britannica editors are not responsible.
Trust. This week I interviewed Tom Panelas, Encyclopedia Britannica’s director of corporate communications for an upcoming article, and he stresses the value of “editorial stewardship.” While reaching out to a wider audience it will not compromise on trust.
The battle over knowledge platforms has always been bitter and not so easy to predict. Think of how Google dethroned Yahoo, and Intranets are being made obsolete by internal blogs. How we access these knowledge repositories could determine how much we value accuracy and trust. Done right and delivered right Britannica could quickly reposition Wikipedia.
“Presidential candidates are big boys (and a big girl), and they get tough treatment in the media because they are trying to get a very powerful, very important job. We don’t overprotect them on Wikipedia just as the U.S. media and international media don’t protect them.”
There’s an interesting discussion going on (at late as 2.40 pm today) on the edit pages of Wikipedia. As the clock ticks for the presumptive candidate who has all but conceded, it’s interesting to see how those who manage and defend brand Clinton duke it out. Whether you disagree with the biases and inaccuracies or not, you just cannot ignore the Wiki effect.
“It sounded like a Vegas slot machine. My computer was just going ding ding ding.”
Veronica McGregor, a former NASA correspondent for CNN, on the number of ‘followers’ of her tweets. McGregor micro-blogged on Twitter on behalf of $420 million Phoenix Mars Lander, and had nearly 10,000 followers as the Lander touched down on Mars.
“I have had enough of political correctness.”
“I’m viewing FriendFeed as a “best of” collection of my friends’ online content.”
“It’s absolutely true that the Web site and the newspaper are not synchronized. I say that’s a good thing.”
“The individual, the company, the nation that is best at avoiding distractions in the future will have an enormous advantage in the competitive marketplace.”
“Now inside a web page, you’ll be able to fly through San Francisco or see a 3D model of a cabin with exactly the view out the window of the mountains.”
“When you’re not nice that the bad things happen to you…”
“He’s gone; the policy—strategic non-communication—may still be in place.”
Journalists are a tough breed. They put up with a lot, and the worst part of it right now is that (unless they are media critics) that they have to write about every other industry but their own that’s going through a huge upheaval. “Newspapers are still far from dead, but the language of the obituary is creeping in,” said the 2008 ‘State of the News Media Report‘ at Journalism.org.
The story of Chris Page, a Mesa journalist and theater critic is a sad obituary on the profession. He was found dead. He had recently moved from the beat of art critic to online journalism, but was recently laid off, said his former employer, the East Valley Tribune.
Online journalism, apart from media itself, is in the thoes of change and reinvention. Newsrooms are being rejiggered overnight with the impact of ‘networked journalism,’ interactive media, and the inroads into news distribution from new technologies.
But the fact remains: we still need boots on the ground, and smart people who cover the story be it about culture, economics, sports, or politics with more depth, not less. Society infatuated by Google search results and “measurement” doesn’t place enough value on these boots and these beats that feed our newsreaders and our online ‘papers.’ Dedicated, award winning professionals like Chris will be surely missed.
I am a frequent reader of the State department’s blog, Dipnote, that attempts to give a human angle to foreign policy -beyond the press releases, official statements and ‘code words’ we have come to know so well.
Dipnote links to an @Google interview with Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and her British counterpart David Miliband (a MIT graduate who happens to have his own YouTube channel, and blog.) This interview is hosted on …YouTube. Suddenly foreign policy via social media doesn’t look so dry.
Rice makes an excellent, passionate albeit slightly flawed analysis of Iraq; between her and Miliband, you get a sense that this is the kind of discourse we (and the world) missed in the last eight years. I’m not saying that social media made this happen, but without doubt these discussions were stifled by the old media that only permitted slogans and sound bites. Only at a venue like this could she say that “we are not, as a government, ever going to ‘improve’ the image of America.” That’s what the people of America do best, she concedes. Which is another way of saying that the government should not be in the business of image building.
The new managing editor of Dipnote, Luke Forgeson, calls the blog the online version of a town hall meeting. As Miliband observes elsewhere, “diplomats need to reach out beyond governments to talk to people – at home and around the world.”
Long live analog networks!
That’s the feeling I got after attending two graduation ceremonies this month at Brophy and NAU. It confirmed my belief that networks belonging to the much derided ‘analog’ era are not about to lose their mojo. The more I write about and inhabit social networks, the more I am convinced of this. Just because we can and do upload our photos to Flickr and Picasa, and just because we can program our phones to ping us when someone writes on our Facebook Wall doesn’t mean our digital lives are superior.
Here’s the set up: At Northern Arizona University, the commencement ceremony was streamed live off the school web site, but the bleachers were jam packed. At Brophy, at my son’s high school graduation on Saturday, the group of giddy high-schoolers seated in front of us continued to take photos of themselves on camera phones, announcing “Myspace picture!” “Smile, you’re on Facebook!” etc. Damn digital natives, huh? Not quite. The reality of it was, this ‘band of sisters’ invested three hours in an overcrowded gymnasium to witness an analog event and cheer on their friends. Uploading those analog moments onto their social networks was only ancillary to being there.
Analog is the glue. The ‘band of brothers’ theme was a strong theme at the Brophy event with many speakers –faculty, the valedictorian etc– giving credit to that human dimension of the four years gone by. This, in a school that has all but replaced text books with tablet PCs! Yesterday at home, these digital natives were not geeking out over an Xbox game, or bluetoothing each other pictures from their camera phones. Instead they indulged in something involving old fashioned analog tools of pencils and paper: A game of Pictionary!
I know you could make a lot of jokes about ‘targeting’ with a bit of (German) bathroom humor. But this approach is …spot on.
Think of it as a call to action that involves a different kind of action.
The tagline is so clever, you’ll never scorn at urinal ads again.
It’s black & white –and read all over, to use a cliche. It’s the new look to ValleyPRblog!
It’s got a very cool look from Forty. But it’s not just the skin we’re excited about, but the functionality and how things are laid out. Based on the traffic we have been getting over the past year, we have a RESOURCES section that’s packed with information about agencies, the media and best practices. For job seekers, we link to national and local organizations.
Give it a try, especially if you’re in the Phoenix area, or plan to be. It may be 98 degrees outside, but it’s where you could come and connect with some really cool folks in PR, marketing and social media.
Having been involved in a pandemic flu exercise here at the Decision Theater, this lede about avatars coming down with a flu, flagged my attention.
But the story in the Canadian Press is more about how social networks and other online tools are being used as an extension of (rather than a replacement of) our communication efforts in social spaces. Where as we once relied on traditional surveys and expensive campaigns, we now have Facebook, virtual worlds and something called ‘proximity marketing.’
Hoipolloireport 