“It’s very important that my anger, my cold anger about the way our staff have been treated … doesn’t turn into a rhetorical volley to the Iranian regime, because that doesn’t do anything for our people or for reform in Iran.”
“The station wanted to do slushy, beautiful music and I quit.”
Leo LaPorte, about how his podcasting career took off late, being interviewed by his daughter, Abby who started her own podcast, Abbey’s Road.
“The falling cost of hand-held video cameras gave birth to a generation of pornographers with little interest in drama beyond a clichéd plot involving a pizza delivery boy.”
Paul Fishbein, president of the AVN Media Network, an industry trade publication.
“It is dangerous to film around Han Chinese if you have blonde (sic) hair and white skin. They get angry.”
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.
“… the menus on the Kindle DX need to be made so blind students can use them,”
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.
“The work we’ve done with Jack and Twitter is a good example of the way we can work with Silicon Valley companies.”
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
“ambient awareness”
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.
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.comgave 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“
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.
Follow up to my post a few weeks back on live blogging an event that involved a Wiki, a science fiction writer, an online game at my work place, the Decision Theater.
The Department of English has a video of the presentation and unveiling of the student-created wiki.
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.
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.
I love it when an audience jumps in to support someone in the social media space.
Take this rant below by Leo Laporte, (at This week in Tech) one of my favorite podcasters.
He dropped the f-bomb on Mike Arrington, and booted him out of the show. But his audience quickly jumped in at John C Dvorak’s blog (Dvorak is a guest on his show) with 149 comments, most of them supportive.
Arrington has since apologized, but more than anything he or Laporte can say, Arrington’s reputation is scarred because he ticked off the audience. A Wikipedia entry confirms that the Gillmor Gang will no longer be hosted on Laporte’s TWiT network.
Think of this as a post about the deeper side of “just words.”
I love tag clouds and word maps. Maybe it is because we deal with visualization quite a bit at the Decision Theater. Last week I ran president Obama’s speech –the one he delivered to Arizona State University graduates– through tagcrowd, and it showed up some interesting emphases. Since we Comms folk at ASU covered the event quite a bit, it threw some new light on the speech.
Check it out here:
So now, here’s another look at that speech, this time the word cloud is generated through Wordle. The dynamic map is here, too.
I’ve been doing a lot of data-gathering on the swine flu since we were alerted to the outbreak last Friday. We are a visualization center and decision-lab that happened to hold pandemic flu exercises, so while we are not public health experts, we know a thing or two about emergency planning.
Apart from talking to the media, managing new media efforts and outreach, my work involves being the eyes and ears of the Decision Theater.
A few years ago this would have taken an enormous amount or work. Today, time-crunch notwithstanding, being plugged into social media has made it easier to stay on top of things. It’s all about being connected to the sources and monitoring the monitors.
Is it live, or is it ‘public?’ Sometimes when I brief the media on a story, what I assume to be public knowledge, is not. When the WHO raises a threat level, when a state epidemiologist confirms a new case, when the governor releases a new document or the state health officials hold a web conference … all these go public as they hit the wires. But unless we have an effective monitoring mechanism, or have hired a media monitoring agency, critical data can get buried in the clutter –and chatter. I subscribe to some news services via SMS, and of course follow a few organizations, on my phone via Twitter. I can now ping a reporter using the Twitter with direct message to confirm something.
Direct from the source. I know, all this tweeting, re-tweeting, Facebooking and blog angst (some of which I have referred to) is precisely what adds to that chatter. But rather than throw the baby out with the bathwater, I think that we are better off with more information, if we know how to use it well. Many who have good data are now not limited to squeezing it through the old pipes (cable) and intermediaries (wire services). They do issue press releases, but they also give us a direct feed. And we are better off for that.
Here are a handful that do a good job of it. An expanded list is on our Decision Theater Blog, Lightbulb Moments.
The latter is worth elaborating on. HealthMap is an interesting project. The two people behind it (John S. Brownstein, an instructor at Harvard Medical School and Clark Freifeld, a software engineer) grab several feeds and lay them out to help us make sense of all that data.
TMI? We can deselect categories in HealthMap if we so wish. In an emergency, few seem to complain about too much information. If at all, there would be an uproar had any organization inadvertently held back some information.
The blogging 101 workshop, at Jobing.com on Monday was quite an experience. As always, I ended up having a great learning experience myself. More on that later.
The topic, Using Blogging and Social Networking to Support Your Job Search, comes with a bunch of disclaimers. At the risk of seeming repetitive, I have to say that a blog will not and should not replace a resume. It may enhance your resume, but better still it gives you a way to rethink how you work on your resume. Or your reputation out there.
A resume, after all is a way to capture your reputation system on a sheet of paper, which is an odd thing to have to do in this day and age. That sheet of paper needs to become a living document, and not something that lives in a folder.
I happen to think that a blog is easier to maintain than a resume. Certainly much easier than a web site. (A few people in the audience had personal web sites. I do, too, and it’s a royal pain to update.) Indeed, a blog requires more care and feeding at the initial stage, but once you set up some good blogging habits, use a few simple tools and tricks, it’s not a huge chore.
Once you compare how limited you are with some of the existing tactics you use to define who you are, and what your potential is, a blog becomes a no-brainer.
I have seen a flurry of responses to the outbreak of swine flu over the past few days, and have to wonder if our ability to monitor and repeat information often overstates the situation /crisis. Or exploit it.
(b) We have to caution many people who ask, because everyone’s in reactive mode, not realizing that this is still an outbreak, not an epidemic, and still far from being declared a pandemic.
I suppose we could hype up the situation, and claim to be ‘experts’ in the field, just to get media attention. But we won’t go there. It is not in the public interest to add to the uncertainty.
Down-playing. Sort of. If at all, I have had to tell media who call that guess what, Arizona was recently ranked the most prepared state as far as pandemic plans. I also sat in a meeting where one researcher in this field noted that Mexico has some of the most advanced epidemiologists, and that their health care monitoring system was not to be doubted.
I have seen communicators jump into this space. Some in a good way. But as Evgeny Morozov of the Open Society Institute noted, “too many Twitter conversations about swine flu seem to be motivated by desires to fit in, do what one’s friends do (i.e. tweet about it) or simply gain more popularity.”
Here’s a short list of how some in the industry reacted:
On Sunday, while I was monitoring the information on the outbreak (at 10 pm Mountain Time), Gerard Baud pinged me about how his outfit is looking at the crisis, with a short podcast. Unfortunately it was an ad for a tele-seminar that you would have to pay for. I would have preferred if the response, in the public interest, was a free ‘seat’ at the teleconference for at least one person in the organization.
Melcrum today published a short but intelligent piece in the Melcrum Hub about an effective crisis communications plan. One of the points they raised seemed so pertinent to the present situation: Stick to the known facts. It’s so easy to go on anecdotal evidence –as in stuff you saw online, repeated by someone who thought she had heard it from a ‘source.’
Ragan Communications also published a good piece on it but unfortunately they too have connencted it to a webinar that will cost you $99.
Happy to note that IABCis making a teleseminar available free. Details here.
Bottom Line. I know times are tough. But people are also getting sick.There are lots of cities, school districts and healthcare systems who have plans but will like to see what else they could do. I don’t think at this time they should pay for learning about better communications to help their local community and their country.
I came across a really neat search engine, with an intriguing name of 
The blogging 101 workshop, at 
Hoipolloireport 