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Author Archives: Steve Mays
“Depth but no conversation”
David Johnson (Poynter Online – E-Media Tidbits) offers some insight on how news organizations cover live events like the recent Health Care Summit:
“Big media and broadcasters can’t give lip service to social media and focus on business as usual because their audiences aren’t even listening with half an ear anymore. Instead, they’re increasingly talking amongst themselves as the tools for conversation and interaction become commonplace and easier to use. (And that audience is having a conversation that may be painful for traditional news directors and producers to hear.)
Speaking as a long-time radio guy, we always thought a wall-to-wall live audio feed was as good as it could get. My god, you got to listen to the entire debate/press conference/trial/etc live! What more could you want?
We’ll, “the people formerly known as the audience” want a lot more.
YouTube SimpleGallery
I love WordPress. I won’t bore you with all the reasons. But one very big one is: plug-ins. These are little add-on’s that add extra functionality to your blog/website. Today one of our sites needed a way to display multiple videos on a single page. I found several plug-in’s that looked like good candidates and settled on one called YouTube SimpleGallery. It’s free but I made a small donation to the developer.
I usually test plug-in’s here, to get the hang of them. If you click on the VIDEO tab at the top of the page,you’ll see a bunch of thumbnail images that –when clicked– play the video on YouTube.
You can also configure the plug-in so the video pops up in its own window.
Leadership
Why Twitter is worth the time
I can’t believe I’m still having to make this case. But I can throw a rock and hit half a dozen people in our company who –at the mention of Twitter– will huff, “I don’t care about what some stranger had for lunch!”
I think most of them know that something more important is going on but they don’t want to admit they might be wrong on the topic. And because they are NOT part of “the conversation,” they don’t see tweets like these on the Twitter page of Mark Neumann, a candidate for governor in Wisconsin, where our company operates a news network.
Neuman has almost 3,600 followers and some of them –who might not otherwise– might hit the link to our site to hear the interview with their guy.
PS: This is the kind of blindness that brings out the smart ass in me.