Lt. Steven Hauk’s (Bruno Kirby) wonderful line from Good Morning, Vietnam. It was brought to mind by this observation in a story about Ze Frank:
“Most people aren’t funny, and most funny people are not funny most of the time.” — Clay Shirky, adjunct professor at New York University (interactive telecommunications program)
For my part, I’d rather be funny than know how to fly.
My buddy Chuck is blogging and podcasting his way across the US, covering something called the AASHTO Interstate 50th Convey. It’s a paid gig for the Ethanol Promotion and Information Council.
This is just an amazing opportunity to to demonstrate the power of new media and Chuck is firing on all 8 ethanol-powered cylinders.
How would the client have promoted this in the previous century? Well, we’d send out some news releases, inviting the media to come to our kick-off (free snacks!). And, uh, we’d send out some more news releases about what is happening along the way. What else? Oh, we’d take some pictures and put them on our website. And if we were really clever, we’d hire a film crew to shoot a little documentary of the journey. In a few weeks (or months), after the thing is edited (down to say, 30 minutes)…we’d send copies to the media in hopes they’d watch it and be so enthralled they’d do an interview with us and put it on their (Network, TV station, radio station, magazine, newspaper). And if they did do an interview, we’d send out a news release telling everyone about that.
Or, you could invite everyone that might possibly give a shit (or should give a shit) to come along for the ride. And if it’s easy enough, and fun enough… a lot of them will.
After I purchased my iPod nano (a year ago? two years?), I installed iTunes on my home desktop Windows machine. And for the most part, that has worked fine. This morning I migrated everything over to the Mac Book and sync’d up the nano. My original thought was I wanted to be able to update podcasts wherever I might be. Before, I had hook up to the home PC…now I sync with the Mac Book which I am keeping with me more and more.
I’ve also loaded my Outlook contacts back on the nano (I’ve found this to be extremely useful). First time I did this it was a bit of a pain. Had to export the contacts from my Win machine at work and jump thru a couple of hoops to get the file on the nano. These days, I keep my Mac Book Address Book sync’d with work (I just drag and drop a file) and sync’ing the nano with the Mac Book is… well, you’ve seen the TV ads.
Pre-Mac, I tended to keep a lot of stuff scattered between home, work, laptop. I find myself looking for ways to get my most important stuff on the Mac. I’m looking forward to my first road trip with the Mac.
Radio Iowa News Dirctor Kay Henderson covered the Iowa GOP and Democratic State Conventions today in Des Moines and her “tool of choice” was her blog.
Kay is not double-jointed (as far as I know) but she has a knack or skill (super power?)…she can type blazing fast. Her posts from the conventions are not verbatim but they’re damned close.
As I read them, I was reminded of an earlier post here at smays.com where I pondered the best tool for covering a live event. I guesss a live video or audio feed of these speeches would have been cool but I think I can make a case for Kay’s posts being “better.” I mean, Jesus, the speeches are on line before the applause dies down.
This is what happens when you equip a really good reporter with a blog.
Recorded June 17, 2006