del.icio.us tags: twitter

Still collecting content on Twitter to get ready for my upcoming training. Luckily, there's lots o' sh*t out there, probably written by Twitter junkies during the many occasions when the site is down.

Todd Mintz posted 101 Everyday Uses for Twitter on InsideCRM this past week. 101 sounds like a hell of a lot, but Mintz's point is that Twitter has "more possible uses than a Swiss Army knife." Not a great deal of analysis, but a good read nevertheless because he lets the Tweets speak for themselves, contributing an excellent structure to the content.

Lee Odden at Online Marketing Blog polled the blog's readers to gain some insight as to how THEY are using Twitter, with the majority of responses falling into the broad categories of sharing (and promoting) sh*t and schmoozing.

Jennifer Woodward Maderazo at PBS' MediaShift has her own take on the value of Twitter. She's a fan, with the site going "above and beyond (her) original expectations in terms of usefulness." She finds it to be particularly useful for her reporting. "If you put out a question to 800 people, someone's bound to have an answer."

Matt Dickman at Techno//Marketer believes Twitter is "the ultimate customer service tool." Joshua March doesn't agree. I fall somewhere in the middle. I think companies should have a presence on Twitter if their customers tend to be early adopters who are inclined to talk about customer service and have some reach or influence. I don't think Twitter should become a core part of your customer service strategy if they are not. Like March says, trying to teach the majority of your customers how to use it is not going to make it something that's well-received. Despite the fact that I agree with March, I wish he used the term "social media" and not "social marketing" to describe his site. (Oh well.)

Seattle is my second home these days, so I shared this post with my peeps in Seattle who I count among my "followers." It's the Most Famous Twitterpreneurs of Seattle, the kings of the 2.0 geeks in the land of the Space Needle. At least one of the comments on the post picked up on what I noticed: "What, no women entrepreneur-twitterers?"

According to Compete, traffic on Twitter doubled between February and April, when approximately 1.2 million people were using the site and the percentage of time spent on Twitter, relative to the overall time spent online, has quadruped in the past six months. Nearly a quarter of the users are "heavy users," which, I am embarrassed to say, means 6+ tweets per month (I average that per day, folks) and overall, users skew young (18-24) and male. (But the experience you have on the site is dependent on who you're following, so, if you're worried about spending too much time with little boys, don't fret.)

I posted about Noah Brier's brandtags, so I hope you've checked it out by now. Here's how folks are tagging the Twitter brand: annoying, pointless, stupid and useless? Who are these people? ;)

For you design lovers, Wallpaper Magazine is on Twitter now . . .

Finally, Palin Ningthoujam at Mashable posted 140+ More Tools to the Twitter Toolbox they created last September. I am officially completely overwhelmed.

clearly you're not up on the news

There are endless year end lists floating around out there now, but my favorite (so far) has been the list pulled together by WireTap of "The Top 10 Youth Activism Victories in 2007."

As we get ready for the outcome of next week's caucus in Iowa, there are already doubters as to whether or not the youth vote will deliver. While I am confident they will, their political action throughout the year should be given the credit -- and the media attention -- it deserves.

The "youth" covered in the article range from 13 to 30 and are tackling issues ranging from climate change to education to post-Katrina health care to the war in Iraq. And like the title of the article says, they have been victorious on a number of fronts.

Here's to even greater victories in 2008.

del.icio.us tags 12.23.07

The British Royal Family has launched their own YouTube channel. Tune in on Christmas Day for the Queen's annual Christmas broadcast. In the meantime, the thrilling (and three part) A Day in the Life of the Prince of Wales is riveting.

The League of Conservation Voters thinks that the Sunday morning news show hosts are neglecting the climate change issue when interviewing the presidential candidates. Head over to What Are They Waiting For? if you think 3 of 2275 questions just isn't enough. Sign the petition. Tell a friend about the site. Get more information. Donate. Keep the media accountable.


Finally, the Pew Internet and American Life Project released their latest report on teens and their use of social media. Lots of good data (as always), but few surprises. The number of teens who are online and creating content is on the rise. Social network use is on the rise, as is blogging, with the latter particularly on the rise among teens from lower income and single parent families. Teens are posting more photos and video than adult internet users. And, whatever you may think, teens who are heavy Internet users are also active offline. And those who are most plugged in are the most communicative and social of all.

del.icio.us tags 12.02.07

Lots of good advice that you probably won't follow. A little bit of geek porn in the form of campaign promises. An experiment that needs some attention. Stories that need to be told. Great pictures, great video, great shopping and a bag that I want to buy.

Search - Aaron and Giovanna Wall published "The Blogger's Guide to Search Engine Optimization." Great stuff. I'm not doing any of it. I don't do most things that I should do. It's a problem.

Viral Video - Kevin Nalts shares his "Ten Lessons for Marketers Using Viral Videos." The list essentially hammers home the point that it's basically a crap shoot when you are trying to figure out what is going to capture consumers' attention and, even then, you still may not manage to actually turn those eyeballs into sales.

Photos - Square America is a collection of vintage snapshots, all of which tell a great story, even if you need to fill in the blanks. The photos remind me of a the "American Snapshot" show I saw recently at the National Gallery. Great stuff. Don't use the photos without an attribute. Give this guy credit (I think his name is Martin Johnson) for what he has put together.

I took this picture outside the Gallery when I went to see the American Snapshot show.

But I like this picture that I took at the National Archives better.

More Photos - Polanoid is working on building the largest collection of Polaroid photos on the planet. Send your pictures!

Storytelling - Polanoid and Square America are telling stories about everyday people, as is StoryCorps. I recently heard the nonprofit's founder, Dave Isay, on NPR talking about the publication of the StoryCorps book with a couple of the project's participants and cried like a baby. I'm a sucker for listening to people tell their stories, both because of the artistry of a good tale and the empowerment of believing that your story is worth being told. Don't tell anyone, but I think a few of you might be getting the StoryCorps book for Hanukkah or Christmas.

Content - WGBH (Boston's public television station and home of Sesame Street) has opened its vaults, providing users with "online access to unique and historically important content," through Open Vault. I wish the search tool was a little more revealing as far as what was possible. It is a great site when you know what you are looking for, but sometimes it's just fun to browse, and it's not friendly to browsers.

The Media - Beat Blogging is an experiment. Thirteen news organizations, along with NewAssignment.net, are trying to understand how journalists can better use social networks to improve beat reporting. There have been no posts since November 20, so the first lesson they should learn is that consistent content is the way to maintain people's attention and engage them in your efforts. Hello, are you out there?

Politics - Barack Obama's campaign has released their "technology and innovation plan." Jon Stokes at Ars Technica doesn't think the document is close to perfect, but he's still pleased that Obama's campaign appears to be paying attention to what the technology geeks are saying, and that's a huge step forward from conversation about clogged tubes and "the Google."

Shopping - If you don't hear from me for a while, I'm probably sitting in my own filth in my apartment, buying things from Supermarket, where they sell fabulous stuff (clothes, bags, household stuff, and paper products) brought to you straight from the designer. Add the site to my list of reasons why the Internet is a fabulous thing.

More Shopping - I want a Carga bag.

del.icio.us: politics

Politics Online thinks Ron's doing something right.

Politics Online has announced their annual list of The Top 10 Who Are Changing the World of Politics and the Internet. The majority of the change makers are overseas -- Australia, Africa, Europe, Korea, Sweden and Greece. (Yes, I know that Sweden and Greece are IN Europe. Look at the list, smart a**) But John Edwards and Ron Paul are making their mark as well.

But Edwards still gets my vote.

Political Base is for political baseheads. So much to play with here. Learn about where the money is going -- and where it is coming from. Get a grip on where the candidates stand on the issues that matter -- and join the conversation.

MSNBC has put together an issues and candidate matrix to enable you to wade through the 12 million people who appear to be currently running for President.

By the way, John Edwards is getting more press than Ron Paul, but more people are searching for information about Ron Paul. If it was a fight, it would look like this.

del.icio.us: media

The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press released new research today that says that people who get the majority of their news from the Internet are growing increasingly disdainful of the mainstream media.

Pew categorizes one-fourth of the American population as "the Internet news audience." They are younger, wealthier and better educated than the rest of the population, suggesting that this is a generational change that requires some attention.

According to the research, the press lacks empathy, does not "stand up for America" enough and is too politically biased, with these viewpoints strongly influenced by political partisanship: more Republicans than Democrats, for example, think the press is too critical of America.

maureen dowd: soon to be fair game

I was trying to catch up on my feeds this morning (must give up and, alas, go to work). Came across the good news (from two days ago) that The New York Times had seen the light and is going to allow access to its Times Select content which is blocked to those of us who don't want to pay the $7.95 subscription fee.

Obviously, $7.95 is not a great deal of money. The issue is that putting up that barrier means that the stuff on the other side doesn't get linked to very often by bloggers, which means that they aren't getting the traffic they could be getting on the site. It's an issue I've kvetched about before. (At this stage, what have I NOT kvetched about?)

Maureen Dowd will soon be fair game, but not just yet. According to the New York Post, the timing for the switch is not yet determined.

Thanks for sharing the good news, Mashable.

"that guy"

I was really impressed last week with the series that the Post did about Vice President Cheney. It was obvious that the reporters -- Jo Becker and Barton Gellman -- had done their homework and, as Hendrik Hertzberg writes in this week's New Yorker, "many of the details and incidents that Gellman and Becker document are as new as they are appalling."

Good stuff.

So, the crap story about John Edwards and his haircuts -- including the nonsense about the stylist "telling his side of the story" and his "long relationship" with the former senator -- is that much more infuriating.

Are you kidding me? Is this the Post or Us?

Buy the print version of the paper and you get a chart -- yes, a chart -- of each haircut and the cost (some were free, some included travel expenses).

And cringe when you read Joseph Torrenueva, the stylist, say how it hurt him when Edwards referred to him as "that guy."

("I did not have sexual relations with that woman . . .)

As Edwards' spokeswoman said, "He didn't lie about weapons of mass destruction or spring Scooter Libby; he just got some expensive haircuts."

Amen.

Disclosure: I get my hair cut and colored every five weeks and it costs me $145 (including tip), unless I buy a new bottle of Bumble & Bumble shampoo, conditioner or styling creme, which set me back about $25 each.

So there.

i have needs

I am not happy.

not a lapdog

I'm a Michael Ware fan. He's too bad ass to deny. The Australian accent. The stubble. The nose that had to have been smashed in a bar brawl. The fact that he didn't bother to get it fixed.

Soledad asked him if he had heckled Senator McCain during a press conference in Baghdad, as The Drudge Report posted yesterday. His denial would have been more believable if he wasn't laughing his way through it and he hadn't just ridiculed McCain two seconds earlier for his optimistic comments about the state of Iraq.

Drudge reports that an official at the press expressed in outrage, "This guy is an activist, not a reporter."

Better to be an activist than a lapdog.

Keep it up, Michael. We need you.

ann coulter is scum #2

From Talking Points, via Andrew Sullivan, the paper boy tells it like it is.

Dump Coulter, Siskiyou Daily News.

sticking to what you know

Like Nedra at Spare Change — who posted on the topic today — I am late in coming to the conversation about Product (RED) and whether or not the HIV/AIDS campaign can be deemed a "success".

But my colleague, Rohit, tagged me to pipe in and so, I will. In his post, Rohit, explains that the issue for many of RED's critics is that the companies benefiting from their affiliation with the high-profile campaign should be writing checks directly to The Global Fund instead of sinking big bucks into marketing their RED products.

For my grad school thesis (yes, John, three years ago), I wrote a strategic plan for the Global Media AIDS Initiative, a project of the Kaiser Family Foundation that aims to leverage the power of the media to educate people and raise awareness of HIV/AIDS. The Initiative — and Kaiser's Entertainment Media Partnerships program — has leveraged hundreds of millions of dollars in donated air time from media companies around the world, including Kaiser's partnership with Viacom for the KNOW HIV/AIDS campaign.

In putting together the justification for the value that media companies brought to the table in the fight against HIV/AIDS, this same criticism arose -- why don't the companies just write a check?

Jen Kates, who is the Director of the Foundation's HIV Policy program and whom I interviewed for my thesis responded to the criticism in the following way:

“The value that we’re talking is in-kind value, not value that the company would ever be able to give to fight AIDS. If a media company said to me, ‘I could give you $100 million for care, treatment or prevention,’ I would say ‘Do that.’ But that’s not what they can do."

I have no idea where Jen would fall on the RED debate, but this is where I fall: it is not an either or situation. The companies that are participating in the campaign are not making the decision between spending money on an ad campaign or spending it on antiretrovirals.

The Global Business Coalition for AIDS, TB and Malaria works with companies to engage them in the fight against these three poverty-related diseases. The consistent message from the GBC is that their member companies should focus on utilizing their "core competencies" to contribute. So, in the case of the Global Media AIDS Initiative, media companies should use their power to reach a wide audience to help to educate, raise awareness and eliminate stigma — one of the greatest barriers to fighting AIDS. And, in the case of Product (RED), lifestyle companies -- companies that market "cool" products like phones and clothes and other things that we buy less out of necessity and more because we're trying to keep up with the Joneses -- should market the notion that giving a sh*t about HIV/AIDS is damn cool. Because, folks, is about more than the money being generated through individual donations. Campaigns like Product (RED) also help to create an environment in which voters support foreign aid packages that help provide funding for the Global Fund, as well as for PEPFAR, etc.

With that said, however, I heartily agree with Nedra that Product (RED) is not taking the campaign far enough. They could be engaging those consumers who — now that they are aware — could be mobilized to take further action. But I've kvetched about the campaign's missed opportunity in the past, so you'll have to click over and read what I said on the agency blog back in December.

Read what others have to say on the topic. Josh Spear, AdRants, Katya's Non-Profit Marketing Blog, Marketing Profs and AdAge are just some of the many who have shared their thoughts.

Anyone else I should read? What do YOU think?

Update: Now I'm annoyed. Folks, the money being spent on the marketing campaigns would not alternatively be spent on drugs, condoms and testing. It would be spend on a marketing campaign that promoted products — minus the RED.

stuffed

I caught this meme over at YPulse — but followed the trail back to Marianne Richmond at BlogHer, who pointed out that, although this meme was picking up speed, most of the respondents have been men.

Therefore, for the sisterhood . . .

Web: I subscribe to 133 feeds that I read via Google Reader with varying degrees of religious devotion. I have 5 Google Alerts set up right now, but they're all worked-related because I was getting overwhelmed trying to keep up with the personal alerts.

There are a few additional news sites that I check out from time to time as well because they don't have feeds, but that happens generally on weekends when I have more time.

I am a religious del.icio.us user and people who know this send me links via del.icio.us.

I subscribe to a few email newsletters and listservs, most of which are work-related and either have to do with global health (Kaiser Daily HIV/AIDS and Women's Health Policy reports, Kaiser's Global Health Reporting, Stop-TB, Af-AIDS, Break the Silence, Gender-AIDS) or marketing/PR (AdAge, Media Post, eMarketer, WOMMA, Marketing Sherpa, BlogHer and a few others I am probably forgetting right now). I also get daily updates from Idealist.org and a word of the day from Dictionary.com.

I aim to post to this blog once a day, which I achieve on occasion. I started a second blog, but that failed because I just don't know what to write about (any ideas?). I am meant to be a contributor to Do You Have One of These? but I haven't been posting lately. Finally, I post to the agency blog from time to time as well.

I recently bought an iPod with video when my other iPod died, but I have yet to become a regular podcast viewer/listener.

Communication: I check my three email accounts — work, Gmail and AOL — multiple times per day. I check Gmail and AOL only via my laptop. I stay on top of work email (or make a valiant effort to do so) via my Blackberry, laptop and desktop in the office.

Anastasia at YPulse wonders where all the social network users are -- but you won't find one here. I have an old Friendster account that I have alerts set up for and so I will check it out when someone contacts me there, but that's about it.

TV: I start every day by watching CNN's American Morning, generally turning it on when it starts at 6:00 am and turning it off when I walk out the front door (usually between 8:00 and 8:30 am).

I turn the TV on when I come home as well, primarily as background noise. I don't have many shows that I watch religiously, but my two favorite nights of television are the sitcoms on CBS on Monday night and 60 Minutes and then ABC on Sunday night (only after that annoying, cloying home improvement show is over). I also watch Grey's Anatomy when it occurs to me.

I rent TV shows from Netflix pretty religiously. In the past three months, I have rented Six Feet Under (Season 4), Curb Your Enthusiasm (Season 4), Entourage (Season 2) and Homicide (Season 3).

Books: I barely ever read books, which is a sore point for me.

Newspapers: I get The Washington Post delivered seven days a week and I try to read it first thing in the morning before heading to work, although I occasionally am forced to put it off until the end of the day. I read the rest of my newspapers online (primarily via feeds): New York Times, Chicago Sun-Times and Los Angeles Times. If I find myself in New York on a Saturday or Sunday, I buy the Sunday Times and when I travel for work, I read the Times on the plane.

Movies: Despite the fact that I spent this past weekend at a film festival, I have given up on going to the movie theater. The simple explanation is that other people drive me crazy and I don't want to be stuck in a room with them for two hours and be forced to trust them to keep quiet and not annoy me. It's not going to happen.

I do, however, rent a fair amount of movies from Netflix. In the past three months, in addition to all the TV shows I rent, I have rented 11 movies: In the Heat of the Night, A Scanner Darkly, Triumph of the Will, A Prairie Home Companion, Riding the Rails, The Baxter, The Statement, Don't Come Knocking, The Assassination of Richard Nixon, I Confess and Inside Man.

I currently have 355 DVD's on my Netflix queue. Add that to the list of proof that I am insane.

Music: I listen to CD's at home because I don't have an amplification system for my iPod here. I listen to my iPod in the car, on the walk to the office and in the office. I like to listen to the radio in the car -- particularly on long car drives -- and will listen to CD's in the car if I don't have my iPod and the radio is failing me. When I travel and I have left my iPod at home, I listen to music on my laptop. I still buy CD's from time to time, but I love buying songs from iTunes. The last song I bought was Mary J. Blige's "Family Affair".

(We don't need no haters.)

Magazines: I recently let a bunch of subscriptions run out — Jane, Spin, Fast Company and something else — so the only subscription I have right now is to The New Yorker, which is an annual gift from my mother (except for my Harvard magazine). I have been a magazine junkie since I was a kid, however, and always have a stack in the house that I am usually at least three months behind on. (I was reading magazines dated December 2006 on the plane home today.) I love Us (shoot me). I also love Details (because I am secretly a gay man). The other magazines in the pile right now are Esquire, Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, Allure, Vanity Fair, Entertainment Weekly and InStyle.

I suddenly understand why I feel so overwhelmed.

I tag Kristen and Jim.

de.icio.us tags 02.18.07

I like the interviews (do you?), but I still feel like I have been cheating and not writing much of my own stuff this week.

Time to catch up on del.icio.us.

Digital Influence

eMarketer released research this past week on global Internet penetration. China is gaining fast on the U.S. in terms of numbers, but still well behind in terms of percentages. I'd be interested in seeing a comparable chart on mobile penetration (does anyone want to point me in the direction?) considering the fact that North America, Europe and Asia dominate and Africa is nowhere to be seen (falling into the "rest of the world" category).

We Media and Zogby teamed up to release a poll this past week on the rise of citizen journalism. According to the poll, the majority of Americans are dissatisfied with the current state of mainstream media and believe that the Internet is having a positive impact on journalism overall. The greatest level of dissatisfaction is among older Americans and conservatives.

Digital Advocacy

Global Cool is trying to make taking a stand against global warming cool -- as if Al Gore isn't doing just fine on his own. I like the Be Cool page because I'm a fan of making it simple for people to do the right thing. But the site might benefit from a little less cool (aka vapid celebrity interviews) and little more confidence in our ability to grasp that, if we don't get our act together, the sh*t is going to hit the fan.

The Kids

I was putting together research recently on the online habits among communities of color and was appalled by the lack of material out there on Asian Americans. (If you know of any good stuff, please share.) Anastasia at YPulse covers some new focus group research from SnapDragon which, while not quantitative and not focused on Internet use, still helps to begin to fill the void. My only question is, who doesn't like Lite FM?

Via threebillion, The Korea Herald says that 1/3 of young people in Korea self-identify as Internet addicts. "Withdrawal symptoms" include blowing off school to spend time online and fighting with parents. Drama.

2008 Election

Via my friends over at EchoDitto, Personal Democracy Forum has launched techPresident to cover how the presidential candidates are using the Internet to make their way to the White House. The easy to read charts about who's doing what and where are great -- particularly because they make it clear that Dems are making better use of social media. By the way, I want to go to the PDF conference in May . . .

and the point?

I'm not the only one who wondered what the h*ll the point was of today's Washington Post story about the people who bought John and Elizabeth Edwards' Georgetown home.

de.icio.us tags 01.03.07

• your local news — Boing Boing was the first to alert me to Placeblogger (others have followed), a new search engine for blogs -- individual or group -- dedicated to "a particular place over time". While the vast majority are from the U.S., they do have placeblogs from around the world, including Azerbaijan. Unfortunately, there's no placeblog for Middletown, CT. Speaking of local, Personal Democracy Forum has seven tips for finding local political blogs -- including using Placeblogger.
• the inevitable barack obama backlash — The news this morning is that Barack Obama "confessed" to trying coke in the past, but Michael Currie Schaeffer, in the Dallas Morning News, was wondering, back in early November, how Obama's "hopelessly out of fashion" smoking habit would impact voters. "I'd venture to say youthful coke-dabblers probably outnumber adult smokers among Mr. Obama's fellow 1980s Harvard Law students." Meanwhile, the Louisiana Weekly suggests that Obama may not have as many fans among black people as he does among whites. In addition to questioning just how black he is (which, to me, is like asking someone how pregnant they are) because his mom is white, there are those that condemn him for not having a history in the Civil Rights Movement. Folks, he's 45 years old. He's a product of the accomplishments of the Civil Rights Movement. Pass the mantle.
• monica lewinsky is not stupid — I missed Richard Cohen's Washington Post op-ed yesterday about Monica Lewinsky because I didn't read yesterday's paper until this morning. But I'm in 100% agreement with Rachel Sklar at Eat the Press, which means that I'm 85% in agreement with Cohen. I too was appalled by Libby Copeland's recent bullsh*t, how-does-this-stuff-get-published piece in the Post ridiculing Lewinsky on the occasion of her recent Master's degree from the prestigious London School of Economics. I too think Cohen should have wrapped up his piece without the stupid comment about how, at 34 years old, Lewinsky was in need of a man before her uterus dried up and fell out.
• be not afraid, volvo isn't — Go ahead, make fun of the Volvo C30. They don't care. If you're product stinks, people will talk. Why not invite them to talk on your product site? You'll earn ten points for confidence and transparency and the positive comments will carry that much more weight.
• on exhibit at the Saatchi: you — The Saatchi Gallery in London has invited students to share their artwork via Stuart, a community site for young artists.

del.icio.us tags 01.02.07

Back to work this morning, so let's get caught up on these del.icio.us tags from the past four days.

From Friday —

David Armano at Logic + Emotion responds to Steve Rubel's recent assertion that the differentiation between social media and mainstream media is gone -- or on its way out. I'm glad Armano did because apparently I was too busy eating holiday fruitcake to do so myself -- until now. As far as I'm concerned, not only is the differentiation still very clear, it should be sustained.

One of Armano's points specifically resonates with me. He argues that, while MSM may be using some of the same tools (i.e., Brian Williams blogs), that doesn't make it social media. Social media may facilitated by tools, but it's not about the tools (despite Wikipedia's definition, which Rubel cites).

As far as I am concerned, social media defines a process or an experience or even a positioning that NEEDS to be defined in contrast to mainstream media. It's about turning up the volume on citizens and providing them with the opportunity to be engaged (in the old school -- non-marketing/PR -- use of the term) in the democratic process.

In other words, Brian Williams could start podcasting from his bedroom, but it would be because someone in the marketing division at NBC thought it would appeal to the elusive 18-24 year old demographic, not because he felt the urge to be heard -- and to participate.

The magic of social media is that it is amplifying voices that may not otherwise be heard. It does not put us all on equal footing, but it does lead those in the mainstream -- corporations, politicians, the media -- to be held more accountable.

It is not that the differentiation between social media and mainstream media no longer exists. Instead, an alternative view would be that -- as the voices of those on the "A-list" start getting louder/heard by more people -- they have simply crossed over the line to mainstream.

We'll miss them, but there will always be more voices that need to be heard.

A side note that occurred to me while writing this, I long for the day when the MSM can be bothered to actually cite blogs specifically -- "as was said by so and so on Daily Kos on Tuesday" -- versus the idiotic, "according to the liberal blogosphere" or "on the blogs, they're saying".

A few others --

• Speaking of mainstream versus social media, Rich Miller (at the Chicago Sun-Times) is getting tired of the political mainstream media's coverage of online political media, whether it's their sweeping generalizations, out and out sloppy reporting of the facts or their dismissal of the relevance of social media to the political process. (Comes via the folks at Echo Ditto, who know damn well about the relevance of social media to the political process, thank you very much.)
  
• The number of Internet users in China has grown by 30 percent in the past year.
• Taylor Marsh at The Huffington Post thinks we've all gotten just a bit too cynical, as judged by some of the knee-jerk responses to John Edwards' decision to announce his candidacy from the 9th Ward in New Orleans.

From Saturday —

• Lee Odden at Online Marketing Blog has some smart ideas for using blogs for online media rooms to increase search engine visibility and for "the added bonus of visibility via blog or RSS channels".
• The Huffington Post has taken over NewsRanker from Eat the Press and added functionality.
• Steve Garfield has some tips for John Edwards' next meeting with bloggers. John, let him let you touch his video camera. You'll like it, I assure you.
• I used Wikiquote when I wrote a post about my favorite film, Badlands, over at my other blog. By the way, starting a second blog was a bad idea . . . I'm looking for my voice over there if you have any thoughts.
  

From Sunday —

• Joe Trippi explains the distinction between transformational and transactional candidates. It's the difference between saying, "Look at what I can do," and "Look at what you can do -- or WE can do together". Is John Edwards 2008's "transformational" candidate?
• Also over at MyDD, Mike Connery has some advice for Democrats who might be getting a little smug about polls that show that young voters are voting for their candidates. My favorite idea is one that marries the high level of community participation among young people with party identification. According to Connery, Democrats Work organizes young people to do service work AS DEMOCRATS. In addition to, as Connery says, building a reputation for the party, what I like is that the initiative communicates to young people that their ideals about life in their community are the foundation upon which the party was built.

Finally, from Monday —

• There's a great deal of hype (judging by the number of other people who have tagged the site) about The Hype Machine. Thanks to the folks at PSFK for the heads up. Find new music by tracking what music is being talked about among bloggers.
• Also from PSFK, Oxfam recently criticized Starbucks for their treatment of Ethiopian coffee farmers, producing a video of a day of protests (December 16) and posting it on YouTube. Starbucks did something oh so obvious, yet brilliant nevertheless. They made their own damn video (nothing fancy, just are response to the criticism) and posted IT on YouTube so that their story could be heard as well. Crisis management 101 -- fill the void and make sure your side of the story is heard. But, in this case, Starbucks also made sure that their story was heard where it needed to be heard — by the people who are watching the Oxfam video.
  

humilty

It does not matter who it is, nor what they have done.

The death penalty is wrong.

This is not a time for celebration, nor smugness.

It is a time for humility.

del.icio.us tags 12.28.06

• Newseum's Today's Front Pages gives you access to 521 front pages from 50 countries. Click on the thumbnail of the front page and you can head to the paper's web site as well. I'm not sure that it's actually useful just yet, but it's still fun to play with.
• Visit Devout when looking for a gift for the freak who has everything.
• Carmine Gallo takes a look at Al Gore's The Inconvenient Truth and comes up with five tips for a successful presentation. I'm thinking about investing in Keynote and this may have just sealed the deal. (I was never as much of a geek as I am today.)
• This is going to come in handy as part of one of my new year's resolutions, don't you think, John? (Come on . . .)
• Speaking of John, I shared this tagged New York Times article with him because it reminded me of his post a while back about "social museums".
  

our media diet

When I was in college, I produced a video advocating for media literacy education called Arm Them with Canons, Shotguns and Booms. Specifically, I advocated for experiential media literacy education, knowing from my own education that peeling back the layers on production better enabled me to recognize how each decision along the way impacts the meaning of the final result.

One of the images that I used in the video was of a young girl sitting mesmerized in front of a "television" (actually, a cardboard box and a blue light), with a hand coming out of it, providing her with candy bar after candy bar that she ate furiously, swallowing every morsel.

My (heavy-handed) point? I wanted to say that I thought the idea that our relationship with the media was so one-sided, defined by them feeding us information to gobble up without pause was ridiculous. While young people -- all of us -- need to further develop our critical thinking/media literacy skills, most of us (often unconsciously) put the information we receive through a filter and derive meaning from it that is defined by identity and experience.

Anyway, I was just reading about a report released by the U.S. Census Bureau earlier this week that includes information about media "consumption". An eMarketer article about the report is titled "Americans Gobbling Up Media" and keeps the eating metaphor going throughout, calling us "multiple-channel media omnivores" and pointing out that we spend more time "consuming" media than we do eating food (I would hope so . . .)

It was only this past weekend that Time magazine told all of us that we were the people of the year precisely because we are NOT consuming media, but because we are producing it ourselves. The food metaphor makes its way into the Time article. "We're ready to balance our diet of predigested news with raw feeds from Baghdad and Boston and Beijing," writes Lev Grossman.

I choose to believe that the mere fact that we seek out those "raw feeds" means that we know that the information being communicated by the mainstream media has been spiced up/sprinkled with salt/fileted/stir fried/covered with butter -- that we recognize what I was trying to advocate for all those years ago. That we seek out those raw feeds because we ARE media literate and that we are NOT merely consumers. That we seek out those raw feeds because we know that the information has been prepared to go down easy, but that our gag reflex has always been there.

So, I'm looking to rid the word "consumer" from my vocabulary. I'm a collaborator. I'm a co-creator. And you?