Movin' Ahead

March 22, 2007March 22, 2007 kenekaplan Politics

Huffington Post Uncovers Hilary Clinton YouTube Poster ParkRidge47

And here it is:

the video was the work of Philip de Vellis, who was the Internet communications director for Sherrod Brown’s 2006 Senate campaign, and who now works at Blue State Digital, a company created by members of Howard Dean’s Internet Team.

The video was posted on YouTube on March 5th under the username ParkRidge47 (Hillary Clinton was born in Park Ridge, Illinois in 1947).

In an email to techpresident.com, ParkRidge47 explained his reason for making the video:

The idea was simple and so was the execution. Make a bold statement about the Democratic primary race by culture jacking a famous commercial and replacing as few images as possible. For some people it doesn’t register, but for people familiar with the ad and the race it has obviously struck a chord.

Track back http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/who-created-hillary-1984_b_43978.html

The video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6h3G-lMZxjo

March 22, 2007 kenekaplan Social Media

Get on the Post-Cluetrain — Hugh MacLeod Advices Edelman & Everyone

This is a fun, matter-of-fact top ten list for understanding why blogging is the real deal. I first saw Hugh MacLeod’s work when Robert Scoble used Hughs cartoons during a PodTech breakfast presentation in Palo Alto in 2006. Robert’s slide were mostly Hugh cartoons with hardly any text by Scoble. The visual and the conversation mixed to make an inspiring impact that morning.

Here are some hightlights:

Blogs allow you to cheaply and quickly begin a smarter conversation. And once you get it going, that conversation starts bleeding out into all other areas of your business- including advertising, PR and corporate communications.

1. I’m not here to tell you about your business.

2. To me, The Cluetrain is the most important book about the internet ever written

3. Nobody cares about you4. You’ve already done “efficient”

5. The growth will come, I believe, not by yet more increased efficiencies, but by humanification

6. If corporate blogs work, it’s because they help humanify the company

7. Blogging is not about reaching a mass audience. Blogging is not about creating yet another sales channel. Blogging is about allowing “The Smarter Conversation” to happen.

8. Having a “Smarter Conversation” is not an intellectual decision. It’s a moral decision

9. Just because the conversation started out smart, doesn’t mean it stayed that way

10. A fairly comprehensive list of corporate blogs

11. Blogs are very culturally disruptive- more so than people realize.

12. “Conversation” is just a metaphor. Then again, no it’s not.

13. Here are some links to give you some food for thought:

The linkback: http://www.gapingvoid.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/3165

March 22, 2007 kenekaplan Media, Social Media

CNBC’s Kramer Under Fire — YouTube LongTail: Out of Context, Still in Sight

Like CNN’s Anderson Cooper says — annoyingly — every night on CNN, “we’re keepin’ ’em honest.” That’s what we can do now over time, thanks to open and free access to digital content. Even if Kramer didn’t do anything wrong, we can still go back in time and see what he said, check his tone and body language, and make our own decision.

This is from the broadcast industry newsletter, Shoptalk.

…from New York and Dane Hamilton at Reuters…Jim Cramer draws fire:

Stock market commentator and CNBC television host Jim Cramer has raised eyebrows after describing illegal activities used by hedge fund managers to manipulate stock prices.

In a December video interview on TheStreet.com (TSCM.O: Quote, Profile, Research) Web site, a financial news company he co-founded, Cramer described how he could push stocks higher or lower, depending on if he was long or short, at his previous job running a hedge fund.

The interview, which has only now got widespread attention after being posted to online video site YouTube, may be studied by U.S. government and stock market regulators, hedge fund experts and legal sources said.

The interview, which can be seen at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=708wDFX28lc, described methods including tactical buying, shorting or using options to create an impression in the market that could prompt other traders and investors to buy or sell a stock.

“A lot of times when I was short at my hedge fund … meaning I needed (a stock) down, I would create a level of activity beforehand that could drive the futures,” said Cramer. “It’s a fun game and it’s a lucrative game.” (more)

March 18, 2007March 18, 2007 kenekaplan Media, Social Media

KK’s Media Consumption Diet

I’m just thrill riding the Your Media Consumption Diet conversations spurred by Jeremiah Owyang back in February.

Several of us at Intel have spent the past few months encouraging people to get more social media savvy by testing out some cooltools like newsfeed, readers, bookmarkers, trackers and measurement tools. Everyone’s super busy, so the key is to show how people can actually do more of what they love and find new ways to love it even more then easily find new and more things to love!

Below is my Media Consumption Diet, but first here is a great observation that requires a law…Jeremiah’s Law, maybe? Like Moore’s Law, Jeremiah’s Law might say that the number of people jumping to the Internet will double every month!! Eventually the the money will catch up with the eyeballs. But the Internet is the great wide open!

“What’s notable is the fact that these early adopters are engaged with media channels in inverse relationship to the amount of advertising money being spent therein. In other words, they’re spending the most time where the least amount of advertising dollars are focused….

* TV: $47 billion
* Magazines: $21 billion
* Newspapers: $20 billion
* Radio: $8 billion
* Internet: $7 billion

Technorati link to see other Media Consumption Diets.

I come from the world of broadcast and began podcasting in 2005. I see it all coming together thanks to people getting video over the Internet. My Media Consumption Diet:

Web: I mostly use Google Personal Home Pageand Reader. My Personal Home aggregator has three tabs:

Home for News — Sections from the NYT, CBS news, BBC, BusinessWeek, AP World, Business and Health.
Social Media for blogs and sites helping define vision and steps for moving ahead with communications — PodTech, Robert Scoble, Jeremiah Owyang, Steve Rubel’s Micro Persuasion, Rohit Bhargava’s Influencial Interactive Marketing, Techmeme, Endgadget, Valleywag, Buzzmachine, YouTube, GoogleVideo, Beet.TV.
K4Karma for things I love about life — Being a parent, awareness, Italy, wine, music.

My Google Reader has about about 25 blogs and feeds, many of the same items found in the Social Media Tab of the Google Personal Homepage.

I also have a My Yahoo! account loaded with mostly news sites like CBS, BBC, CNETMy three-year subscription to WSJ Online expired and I didn’t renew (pinching pennies for the wife and kids!).

But I often type www.news.com and www.siliconvalleywatcher.com and see what grabs me.

Music: Got a video iPod in 2006 to carry all of my favorite PodTech podcasts, but now it’s loaded with Bob Marley, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Audio Slave, KanyeWest, Sisters of Mercy, The Cult, Ben Harper, CCR, Madonna, Beyonce, more. In my car, it’s CDs past and present, including Italy pop from the ’70s and Fado music from Portugal and Brazil.

TV: I cut my teeth at a local TV station in San Francisco, KRON-TV when it was an NBC affiliate owned by the SF Royal Family who owned the SF Chronicle. My role at Intel is a broadcast media relations manager. I gotta watch TV, and I enjoy it…especially because the cheese factor hits my funny bone. I always tune to CNN and local news, and enjoy seeing the networks redefine themselves every season. But my young kids are more fun and entertaining, and the TV is not on for too long on any given day.

Communication: Love my Blackberry. That’s a game changer for me. And I love Skype because it allows me to work from Italy and make every necessary meeting back in the U.S. for free! I started with Twitter in February, but I’m learning.

Movies: I was a movie festival goer for many years in San Francisco. I love movies. I can go by myself, with a group of people or watch on the plane. Love movies! But I regret that my passion has been starved more and more each year. I gotta get back to what I love! Documentaries, bio-pics, visually poetic stories and intensely scripted stories that leave you wondering for days after the movie ends.

Magazines: Subscribe to Esquire. Victoria Secret brings joy whenever it arrives. At the airport I pick up BusinessWeek and Fortune.

Books: I love philosophy past and present. I also like books about learning and better understanding self and others living in the world together. I typically have three books going at once, but I’m a slow reader who get’s interrupted often so I finish about three a year.

Newspapers: Wall Street Journal, but my hard copy subscription is coming to an end soon…and that’s it! San Francisco Chronicle, and I’ll won’t renew my subscription this summer. I love the writing in the Christian Science Monitor. And the NYT is something I grab at the airport. When it’s there, I pick up USA Today eat it up like junk food. When in NY, I must get my hands on the NY Post and Village Voice. I’m a newspaper junky to rips pages and stuffs them in my man purse until I can still a few moments to consume them uninterrupted.

This excersize shows that I’m weening off of what I’ve always loved, newspapers. My love won’t end, but my daily consumption will come from the Web and any scraps from sections people leave behind.

March 18, 2007 kenekaplan Media

Old, New Media — Together on to the Next

San Francisco Chronicle’s Joe Garofoli wrote a story based on the 4th edition of “The State of the News Media.” These types of research reports are nobel because they get the attention of business, political and leaders of other establishments. But this discussion and every item below has been bouncing around for years. And during that time, social media has had time and space to grown and become important in people’s lives. Why not synergize, or have both generations work together. Maybe we don’t have to pass a torch from old generation to the new generations. Maybe the best of both is what will dfine all of the the next generations to come.

For me, here’s the core of the report: There is no vision yet…sounds like an opportunity. There are lots of great voices out there — maybe no clear leaders but some pretty good influencers — and now’s the time to listen and reply to help the best rise to the top.

In nearly every sector except ethnic news, audiences are splintering off to many other media options. Even Fox News, which has come to dominate cable news in recent years, is showing a viewership decline, according to the report.

The report says, “No clear models of how to do journalism online really exist yet, and some qualities are still only marginally explored.”

Media outlets and advertisers often disagree on how to measure the amount of news the audience is consuming and where it is flitting to online.

Electronic media are in transition from the “Argument Culture,” epitomized by the canceled CNN shoutfest “Crossfire,” to the “Answer Culture,” exemplified by the branded persona of CNN anchor Anderson Cooper and the exposure of child predators by NBC’s “Dateline.”

The blogosphere is evolving, too, “splintering into elites and nonelites over standards and ethics,” the report said. Some bloggers are joining mainstream media outlets and political campaigns, and corporations are beginning to covertly use blogs to market their products. “The paradox of professionalizing the medium to preserve its integrity is the start of a complicated new era in the evolution of the blogosphere,” the report says.

A danger lurks behind journalism‘s “shrinking ambitions.” Basic monitoring of local and regional government is suffering, it says.

Print outlets realize where their readers are going — online, mostly, and occasionally to their own news Web sites. And judging by the people joining the public news conversation on blogs and elsewhere, they have seen that there remains a thirst for news.

Traditional and new media have to figure out how to turn all those eyeballs into money.

Full article here: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/03/12/MNGV1OJHEA1.DTL&hw=study+finds+journalism&sn=004&sc=504

March 18, 2007 kenekaplan Media

Against the Tide of Free, Open Access

San Francisco Chronicle columnist David Lazarus had me going. Until the end of his 3/14/07 article, “Pay-to-play is one way to help save newspapers.” I’m a slow reader — that brain of mine wonders at it’s pace, fits and starts — and was soaking up the possibilities and challenges. But when I read the last two paragrpahs, that’s when I woke up!

“The students I teach really do believe that everything on the Internet is theirs for the taking,” Kirtley said. “Young people have been conditioned to believe that they’re entitled to this content.”

It’s time for newspapers to condition them otherwise.

This is the discussion to explore. “Condition”-ing can be a good even heathly thing, no doubt, especially if you have compulsive or habitual behavior that is damaging to you and others. But conditioning also has negative meanings, like ethnic cleansing, irradicating, rooting out, or getting rid of something for good. For good. Is that how we all live together in the world? Seems evil, when the more challenging way is to collaboriate, accept that there is no good without bad and find ways to better understand. Not just through talking or planning, but by doing things together. That’s what will happen in our next phase.

These days we’re seeing a lot of “fighting back” or “drawing the line.” Why not collaborate without limiting the frontiers of possibilities and collective imagination.

If we have to pay for something we never paid for before, that is elitist and limiting. I will pay to feed my kids and stave myself of news and information because I can’t afford it.

David Lasarus is doing the right thing by defining, strengthening and sharing some vision for the struggling traditional media. This will make us all better, but switching to a full pay-to-play model is not the solution in my opinion. Newspapers and broadcasters already do pay-for-play techniques. I’d venture to say that if traditional media put more resources and mindpower behind existing pay-for-play parts of their business, they’d get the payers coming back for more…and offering to pay more to improve things. And this would spur great ideas for new pay-for-play opportunities as large and small companies and individuals collaborate with traditional media.

Traditional media needs investors, business partners and subscribers. And we need the media. But it might be wise if traditional media stepped back and took pride in seeing that “we are the media” thanks to them and new technology. A threat, or opportunity?

In refernce to David’s ding on bloggers who post whole stories copied from traditional media Websites, I won’t past the complete story here. BI love booking cool things I find, I like to Dig good stories on occassion. But tell me this: Why would SF Gate offer social bookmarking on thier site if they didn’t want their stories to be “portable”?

Full story here: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/03/14/BUG4COKGDU1.DTL&hw=pay+to+play&sn=006&sc=724

March 17, 2007 kenekaplan Uncategorized

Robert Scoble Talks To Rocketboom at SXSW

My pals at PodTech turned me on to IceRocket about six months ago. It\’s a very cool, free tool to graph blog buzz comparing topics or companies. At Intel, we\’ve been using Rocketboom to show how technology breakthrough stories are encouraging conversations.

[podtech content=http://media1.podtech.net/media/2007/03/PID_010516/Podtech_Vloggies_Scoble_Rocket_Boom.flv&postURL=http://www.podtech.net/home/technology/2368/robert-scoble-talks-to-rocketboom-at-sxsw&totalTime=725000&breadcrumb=3F34K2L1]

March 15, 2007 kenekaplan Media, Religion, TV

Vatican “We Are the Media,” Too

The Vatican has been worldwide media savvy with print, radio and is now starting it’s own broadcast network. Sure those are “traditional” media, but all media — old, new, social — is media. And this is the age when we can all participate like media, maybe just not like some of the world’s wealthy media giants.

I found this story in the broadcast daily newsletter, ShopTalk. It struck me for what it says and doen’t say. The Vatican is making a big investment to create ways to share their voices, passions and stories past, present and future. But like an earlier post in this blog, Robert Scoble interviewed a Catholic Sisiter who is a top ranking IT guru for the Vatican. That interview showed that the Vatican — like companies, individuals, families…good and bad — have strong desires to show and tell stories.

This is the age of expression! It’s best to invest so that you can show and tell your stories clearly, intelligently, with passion and insight. If you have the insider’s view, you get to present it first hand to the world. Doing it with full disclosure, consideration for audiences and good storytelling skills will allow everyone to get information from “the source” and make their own decisions about what they believe.

Here’s the story:

Eric J. Lyman at Reuters/Hollywood Reporter, the Vatican plans new TV network:

Days after Pope Benedict XVI criticised the media for its “destructive” influence, the Vatican on Monday announced plans to launch its first television network by the end of the year.

Pope Benedict XVI greets the crowd at the start of his weekly Angelus address over St Peter’s square at the Vatican REUTERS/Tony Gentile
H2O will broadcast news and original entertainment programming worldwide in seven languages, according to a statement. Additional details were sketchy.Over the years, the Vatican has been quick to adopt new technologies in its efforts to communicate with the world’s more than 1 billion Catholics. In 1996, the Vatican introduced its Web portal nearly three years before the Italian state unveiled its own Web site. And it has embraced digital and satellite technology. (more)