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A “teaching moment” or Big Brother?
YouDiligence.com is the brain-child of Kevin Long. According to a blog post on ESPNB’s Jock-O-Sphere, the service works like this:
“…for a small fee — $1,250 a year for 50 athletes or less, or $5,000 a year for 500-750 athletes (described as pennies a day for each athlete) — schools are essentially given a broad-scale monitoring system for their athletes’ Twitter, MySpace and Facebook pages. Enter in the keywords you’d prefer not to show up in your student-athletes’ stream — these can range from curse words to alcohol and drug references to just about anything; it’s entirely customizable — and the instant any of these buzz words are posted to a student-athletes’ social media stream, administrators can be alerted via e-mail and a detailed account of the instance is added to a spreadsheet log … instead of online a few hours later on a blog or newspaper’s Web site, which could be potentially damaging to the program.”
This is a really interesting post (by Ryan Corazza, a freelance writer and Web designer based in Chicago), whether you’re in the world of college athletics or not. Would you (would I) be okay with your company monitoring what you post on social sites? Are you sure they are not? Would it make a difference in what you post?
Disclosure: At least one of the schools mentioned in the post is a “university partner” of the company I work for, Learfield.
For the record, I don’t see anything wrong with schools keeping an eye on what their student athelets are saying/writing. I mean, it’s out there. You should assume everyone is reading every word you post.
If you feel that your school is censoring your freedom of speech, then it’s decision time.
Bohemian Rhapsody on the ukulele
Google Buzz
I’ve been noodling around with Google Buzz a bit and my early impression if very positive. Now, I’m not going to even try to explain Google Buzz. You can watch the video below if you’re interested. And I’m not going to encourage you to “follow” me on Buzz. Or try to sell you on social media, or anything else. This is one of my “for the record” posts.
I will say that more and more of what I find interesting is going to my social media streams, which will now mostly show up on my Buzz profile page. If you have a Gmail account you have (or soon will have) Buzz.
Streaming video of committee hearing
I took the little BT-1 Bluetooth webcam back to the Missouri capitol yesterday for a hearing. Used twitcam to stream. The audio was poor to marginal and the video about what you’d expect from a $150 camera. It was basically a final field test and I was pleased.
If you look closely (red arrow) in the top left corner of the photo above, you can see the aluminum legs of the small tripod holding the camera. I was about 20-25 feet away. The camera was very unobtrusive and it was convenient to be untethered and out of the way.
One of these days there will be a high-profile news conference we’ll want to stream live and I’ll just grab the BT-1 and the MacBook Pro. We don’ need no stinkin’ satellite truck.
PS: I have no idea why Wilfred Brimmley is on the committee (top center)
MacBook Book
Irresistible.
“Information is not a scarcity”
A few ideas from today’s post Jeff Jarvis’ BuzzMachine blog:
“If you are selling a scarcity — an inventory — of any nonphysical goods today, stop, turn around, and start selling value — outcomes — instead. Or you’re screwed. Apply this rule to many enterprises: advertising, media, content, information, education, consultation, and to some extent, performance.”
“Relationships. That’s what the business of media must become. In our New Business Models for News, we began — just began — to project the value of the relationship a new media service can have in its community: creating events; educating; gathering and selling data; selling goods directly (as the Telegraph does, quite successfully); running networks to help others succeed; saving money by collaborating.”
“Information is not a scarcity, or at least it isn’t scarce for long. Yes, when I don’t know something, then the answer is scarce. But now it’s much easier to get that answer; Google will have it in .3 seconds and if it doesn’t and if enough of us ask it, then someone at Demand Media will write it for me and the rest of the world for $20. When news is new, its value is scarce (as Thomson Reuters Tom Glocer says, his information has its highest value in its first 3 milliseconds); but then that value deflates.”
Alrighty then.
BandMaker.com
I think we can all agree that the hardest part of having a successful rock band is coming up with a good name. You can always find a drummer or a lead singer but a good band name… very difficult. Fortunately, there are no shortages of websites to help with this critical task. At BandMaker.com you plug in some words and get some recommendations. I think you can do the same thing at WORDLAB but I got distracted browsing their list of 4,000+ names for rock bands. A few of my favorites:
- Adjustable Waistbands
- Viral Bunny
- Twinkie Spore
- Turd Cribbage
- Tim Tation and the Quagmire
- Stool Patrol
- Sandy Muff
- Rock Paper Sisters
- Nuclear Winter Squash
I wanted to try my hand at some names but came up dry. So I pulled a few from my tag cloud (sidebar)
- Anonymous Audio
- Blackberry Brush with Near Greatness
- Coffee Zone Consciousness
- PowerPoint Prison Santa
- Smoking Spam Tattoos
Let me know if you decide to use one of these.
“Writing skill no longer enough to sustain journalists”
The headline above drew my attention to a post by Robert Niles in the Online Journalism Review. Mr. Niles has worked as an editorial writer and reporter for several newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times, Rocky Mountain News, Omaha World-Herald and the (Bloomington, Ind.) Herald-Times.
“As the 21st century progresses, going to school to major in writing and shooting stories will become like going to school to learn breathing. What’s the point? It’s a ubiquitous activity that everyone learns on his or her own long before college. With so many more people getting their 10,000 hours of writing and shooting early in life, more people than ever are able now technically to report to others the news that they encounter. What’s the value in being a journalist when everyone is doing journalism? [emphasis mine]
“Yes, news organizations must find new production models that allow them to remain profitable in a competitive publishing market. But news publishers must also reconsider whom they’re hiring. Journalism schools must also reconsider the instruction that they provide.”
“There’s no longer any use in merely teaching people to write to a formula and conform to a specific style book. While those skills had enough value a generation ago for an individual to build a career, the new, hyper-literate media marketplace has rendered those skills – in isolation – as practically worthless.”
I remember when the number one requirement for getting an on-air job at a radio station was a pleasant speaking voice. A “good set of pipes.” If you could think while speaking into a microphone, better still but not a deal breaker.
If you were going to work in the news department (yes, radio stations used to have entire departments for news gathering), you also needed to know how to write a story (IN ALL CAPS) that included “sound bites.”
In an earlier post I referred to the RTNDA (Radio and Television News Directors Association). That was incorrect. It’s now RTDNA: Radio Television Digital News Association. An acknowledgment that news is happening some place other than on radio and television. When any website can have audio and video (that would be called “now”), one has to wonder if DNA might be the more apt acronym (already taken).
And when ALL news is digital, will it be the News Association. And when everyone is producing news…
I’ve struggled to understand why so many of the journalists I know resist learning the new skills Mr. Niles refers to. I’ve concluded it would be an acknowledgment that the skills they’ve worked so long to hone are no longer enough. It would be –in some sense– like starting over. No thank you.
We have an opening in one of our newsrooms now. I won’t be involved in recruiting and filling the position. For that I am grateful.
Disclaimer: I am not a journalist. I did not go to journalism school. I went to keep-my-deferment-and-stay-out-of-Viet-Nam-school.
Matt Taibbi: “The Committee of Banned Words”
“I think we ought to get it over with once and for all and ask all the people who are interested in banning words to get together and form their inevitable committee on word propriety. I think it would be a great thing if we could just get the list together ahead of time, along with what the committee feels the appropriate sanction is for each word. “Ho” we know is a fireable word, as is “niggardly,” but what about “snapper”? How about “curry muncher”? What is the appropriate punishment for a “What’s wrong, do you have sand in your vagina?” joke? I mean there are so many unknowns right now, nobody knows where he or she stands.”