Yearly Archives: 2009

Twitter coverage of prison release

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Joshua Charles Kezer walked out of prison a free man. In jail since he was 18, Kezer has been in prison for 16 years for the 1992 killing of Angela Mischelle Lawless, a 19-year-old college student found shot to death in her car just off Interstate 55 near Benton, Mo. A Cole County judge overturned his murder sentence and a Scott County prosecutor has declined to file new charges against him. You can read the full story –by Tony Messenger– at StlToday.com.

I continue to be fascinated by Twitter as tool for reporting. This story probably wasn’t big enough for TV or radio to break format (what a quaint term). But Tony’s “tweets” give me the sense of being there, watching. Not sure how else he might have accomplished this. Remember when radio was the most immediate medium?

Google bails on radio

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Google ended its three-year affair with trying to break into radio Thursday, with the company saying it is selling its Radio Automation business. Google in 2006, launched Google Audio Ads and Google Radio Automation after buying dMarc Broadcasting, Inc for $102.0 million. Google made the move in the hope of transforming how radio ads are bought, aiming to streamline the entire process. The company said these plans, however, “haven’t had the impact we hoped for.”

Google said it will turn its focus from radio to online streaming audio. It will phase out the existing Google Audio Ads and AdSense for Audio products and plans to sell Google Radio Automation – the software that automates broadcast radio programming. [Forbes.com]

Hmm. A couple of ways to interpret this.

The reporter of the future is here today

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Micro Persuasion:

“The word newspaper is really a misnomer today. Or at least it will be soon. Increasingly news is delivered digitally and it’s interactive. People are certainly writing newspapers off for dead, but I think they have a bright future (in digital form) and it’s right in front of them.

Everyone’s looking for a solution to the newspaper problem. But the answer is right under their nose. The picture is slowly evolving through the breakthrough work of individual reporters who are using social media to build a stronger connection with their audience (and their own personal brands in the process).”

Read the post for the answer. If you work for our company and would like to know how to use any of the tools referenced in this post, I will be happy to help you get started. If you work for another company, we have a digital SWAT team that can get you started.

Pill to erase bad memories

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I first wondered about this back in 2004. A couple of years later, 60 Minutes did a segment on one such drug. Now Dutch researchers claim to have erased bad memories by using ‘beta-blocker’ drugs, which are usually prescribed to patients with heart disease.

“The astonishing treatment could help sufferers of post-traumatic stress disorder and those whose lives are plagued by hurtful recurrent memories. But British experts said the breakthrough raises disturbing ethical questions about what makes us human. They also warned it could have damaging psychological consequences, preventing those who take it from learning from their mistakes.”

Would I take such a pill? I think I might. I haven’t experienced more than my share of pain or trauma but if I’m a better person for it, I’m hard pressed to say how.

“But you are YOU because of the sum of your experiences, smays.com,” one might argue.

Yes, and I’d just be a different person if I took the pill and erased the memories. In fact, maybe I did take the pill. I wouldn’t remember, would I?

And before we leave this topic… how is this different from taking pills that alter our perception of this moment (Valuium, anti-anxiety meds, etc)?

Why @anamariecox wears pants to the White House

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When you have almost 50,000 folks following your Twitter feed, a little guide book comes in handy. Here’s a snippet from Ana Marie Cox’s:

“I cover Washington and am somewhat obsessive about politics in general so you’ll be getting what is a basically a live feed from inside my head regarding whatever I’m doing that day: Attending a White House briefing, going up to the Senate, watching C-SPAN, trying to figure out why that small man from Alabama is so angry… (Here I am referring to Sen. Jeff Sessions, aka, “the littlest Senator,” aka “the Southern leprechaun.”) Because I also have a “blue” streak (not talking politics here) you will also get hopefully funny interpolations of wonkspeak into what I like to call “sexytalk.” See here, for examples, for what happens when congressmen start talking about how a “stimulus” requires a “big package.”

If you like your politix serious, you can skip AMC. Has she been on the Daily Show yet and why not?

The photography of Matthew Howard

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Matt Howard is a talented photographer in Kennett, MO (my home town). Matt’s day job is personal trainer so I guess he’s technically an amateur but certainly in the best sense of that word. I stumbled onto Matt’s flickr page recently and was immediately taken with his haunting (for me) images of the flat, empty fields I remember growing up. I got him on the phone for a brief (15 min) chat this afternoon during which he explained his passion for photography started with a book rather than a camera.

AUDIO: Interview with Matt Howard 15 min MP3

 

“Blogs don’t make money. But people with blogs can.”

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Dave Winer says he’s made more than $2 million with his blog over the last 12 years. And he’s never put a single ad on it. He explains how this came to be –and the role of a blog– in this excellent post:

“…it’s a way of communicating what you’re doing. Companies, consultants and authors need to do a lot of communicating, and blogs allow you to go direct, and be more efficient, less diluted. People get a real feel for who you are and how you think and what you’re like as a person. Why would I ever let someone else hitch their “message” on this — it would get in the way of me making money!

If I had any advice to offer it’s this — get in the habit of communicating directly with the people you want to influence. Don’t charge them to read it and don’t let others interfere with your communication. Talk through your blog as you would talk face to face. You’d never stop mid-sentence and say “But first a word from my sponsor!” — so don’t do that on your blog either. I can’t promise you’ll make any money from your blog, and I think the more you try the less chance you have. Make a good product and listen to your customers to make it better, and use the tools to communicate, and you may well make money from the whole thing. To expect the blog alone to pay your bills is to misunderstand what a blog can do.”

If you’re a blogger or think you might ever be, this post is worth a read.

“Democratization of information”

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Last month I –like many others– made note of Janis Krums being among the first to report (on his Twitter feed) that an airliner had crash landed in the Hudson River. Will Leitch was in the SF offices of Twitter, working on an article for New York Magazine, as the story was breaking.

“In the midst of chaos—a plane just crashed right in front of him!—Krums’s first instinct was to take a picture and load it to the web. There was nothing capitalistic or altruistic about it. Something amazing happened, and without thinking, he sent it out to the world. And let’s say he hadn’t. Let’s say he took this incredible photo—a photo any journalist would send to the Pulitzer board—and decided to sell it, said he was hanging onto it for the highest bidder. He would have been vilified by bloggers and Twitterers alike. His is a culture of sharing information. This is the culture Twitter is counting on. Whatever your thoughts on its ability to exist outside the collapsing economy or its inability (so far) to put a price tag on its services, that’s a real thing. That’s the instinct Stone was talking about. If the nation has tens of millions of people like Krums, that’s a phenomenon. That’s what Twitter is waiting for.”

I’ve given up trying to explain the phenomenon that Twitter has become but can’t help take note of the examples that pop up almost every day.

@angelawilson does freelance work for us and works from her home. Today she had The Price is Right on (“just for background”) and one of the ladies picked to be a contestant was part of a group of women wearing shirts with their Twitter names on the front (mine is @smaysdotcom). Host Drew Cary had to explain to the studio and viewing audience what Twitter was. I hope that shows up on YouTube because I’d really like to see it.

And then this afternoon I learned (from the Twitter feed of St. Louis Post-Dispatch Reporter Tony Messenger) that some kind of big “nuke hearing” was getting ready to start in the Senate. And that there was so much interest the hearing room was so packed they had to set up closed circuit TV monitors in a room on the third floor.

I followed Tony’s Twitter feed for a bit, where I learned that one of the senators (Jolie Justus) on the committee holding the hearing, was also using Twitter to let her “followers” know what was going on. You can check out her “tweets” (you should pardon the expression) at http://twitter.com/joliejustus. Where she assured us she’d tell us more about the four hour hearing tomorrow on her blog, Fresh Meat (she’s a freshman senator?).

What does all of this mean? I’m not sure I know. Does it mean something? Yeah, I’m pretty sure it does. As Twitter co-founder Ev Williams says in the NY mag piece:

“It’s another step toward the democratization of information. I’ve come to really believe that if you make it easier for people to share information, more good things happen.”

Me too.

UPDATE: Sen. Justus started her blog as a Freshman Senator two years ago. [Thanks, JW]