The Teleprompter is Us Tonight’s State of the Union address is being billed as “the most interactive political act ever.” Well, other than the crowdsourcing that brought people to the guillotine during the French Revolution. Although, if you read through the comments sections on some of the danker political blogs, there’s certainly reason to look [...] [...more]
The Teleprompter is Us
Tonight’s State of the Union address is being billed as “the most interactive political act ever.”
Anyway – it appears that Obama’s web team has spent the past year (or more) preparing to swing into full campaign mode.
From ReadWriteWeb:
In December 2011, I wrote in the ReadWriteWeb Predictions for 2012 that the presidential candidate with the best social media campaign would be the one to win the White House in November 2012. I also said that President Obama would likely be reelected. While social media is not the be all, end all factor in determining the results of elections, pundits will argue that it has greater weight now than it ever has. Candidates pay attention to what their Twitter followers are saying.
(snip)
To a certain extent, tonight’s State Of The Union will be the biggest campaign stump speech that Obama will give all year, except for maybe the Democratic National Convention. Around the State of the Union speech, the President has built a robust social media campaign to give citizens a voice. This is how government should be run. Open. Transparent. Interactive. Go to where the people are as opposed to making them come to you.
UPDATE:
Let’s see how that interactive thingy worked, shall we? ue
The YouTube questions were pretty much what you’d expect – a mix of the rude, the longwinded, the unanswerable and the insane.
Tell EMINEM to Put another Album out..(Name is E=Mc2)
What are you going to do with all the police who think they are all that, just because they can do almost anything they want without getting caught doesn’t make them better. Also my friend told me a police was setting a role model of cussing a 5 grdr
Will you tell us why you passed the SOPA? Do you have anything againsy gay people? Can YOU stop making Cigars? What do people have to have in order to become the president? Is the world gonna end in 2012? PLEASE ANSWER ALL THESE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS!!
I would love to know why marijuana not legal. It is really good for you they said on cnn News it don’t do anything to your lungs compared to people who smoke cigarettes. Also it kills Brain cancer cells and blocks heart blockages.
Why you are spending more money to grab genitles at airports, sell children, traffic weapons, drugs, eugincs depopulation…rather than allowing non corrupt technicians associated with The Venus Project to solve every human need including yours?
Mr. President, if you want my vote again this November, please answer this: WHERE IS THE CHANGE!?Minimum wage still doesn’t cover our basic necessities.A human being cannot survive on these wages with children. How are your children doing? Quite well
It's like operant conditioning. If you don't give the monkey the shock, it won't stop pushing the lever that used to deliver it hits of cocaine. Well, the government has been working overtime to try to stave off that shock. Which is all well & good - nobody likes getting high-voltage shocks - but my concern is that if we don't in some way start changing our mindless consumerist behavior, the eventual shock is going to be much, much worse than what we've got coming in the next year or so, if we just stand & take our medicine.
[...more]
I saw this comment over at a political blog today:
We are likely to see a weak GOP and a democratic party beset by infighting. Get ready for a decade of political chaos on top of economic chaos. There is no way to take even an educated guess of what will arise from the ashes.
Which, actually, might be the best thing for this country.
We have learned nothing from The Crash yet. Which means that we aren’t yet going to change our behavior.
It’s like operant conditioning. If you don’t give the monkey the shock, it won’t stop pushing the lever that used to deliver it hits of cocaine. Well, the government has been working overtime to try to stave off that shock. Which is all well & good – nobody likes getting high-voltage shocks – but my concern is that if we don’t in some way start changing our mindless consumerist behavior, the eventual shock is going to be much, much worse than what we’ve got coming in the next year or so, if we just stand & take our medicine.
I”m looking at the long-term effects of jamming this much cash into our economy – at last count, we’re getting up near $10 TRILLION in so-called “bailout” cash. Yeah, for the next year or so, we’re going to cushion the comedown from the last 8 (or 28, really) years of borrowing & spending like drunken sailors while not really producing anything.
The problem is that long-term, the effect of waving a magic wand to create that much cash is going to be … well, you’re familiar with supply & demand, right? When supply exceeds demand, value goes down.
So when an extra 10 trillion of the commodity known as “dollars” gets jammed into the system … what does that mean for the value of the dollar?
Buy gold, folks. Gold, silver, or arable land. I’d like to think that there’s some greater plan for doing these crazy macroeconomic borrowing policies in the short term & fixing them in the mid-term, but I just don’t see it happening yet.
…the makers of this YouTube hit video (it just got Fark‘d and Arrington‘d) are now your patron saints. This little NSFW gem will bring a rueful (vindictive?) smile to anyone who’s had to deal with dim-bulb non-techies who can’t articulate what’s wrong, what they want, and least of all, understand what the solutions that they [...] [...more]
…the makers of this YouTube hit video (it just got Fark‘d and Arrington‘d) are now your patron saints.
This little NSFW gem will bring a rueful (vindictive?) smile to anyone who’s had to deal with dim-bulb non-techies who can’t articulate what’s wrong, what they want, and least of all, understand what the solutions that they are demanding will actually do.
Great moment where the vid starts getting really brilliant comes about 1/3 of the way through – Salesguy: “Now I can’t get to the home page!”
Web Dude: “What the –!?? But you said the website was down? You mean you could see the home page?”
I particularly liked the little touches in this video – as Web Dude gets more and more frustrated and annoyed, he starts taking it out on the characters in Halo, shooting them repeatedly in the crotch and attaching grenades to their faces.
I’ve never done IT fulltime myself, but I’ve usually been one of the “go-to” guys in the office when IT isn’t available. Thus, I’ve spent my share of time ostentatiously rolling my eyes and sighing. I did like, however, how both sides took their shots – the sales dweebs are demanding, ignorant and try to evade responsibility for the chaos they cause. The IT dweebs are more interested in playing Halo than actually dealing with anything, and snort dismissively in that way that makes users retreat and get defensive.
Yet another quick hit – just checked to see how many more answers I’m getting from the LinkedIn question I posted earlier this week, and noticed that the Obama campaign today posted a question on what the best ideas are to “keep America competitive in the years ahead.” What ideas do you have to keep [...] [...more]
What ideas do you have to keep America competitive in the years ahead?
In a recent speech, I proposed a new competiveness agenda centered
around education and energy, innovation and infrastructure, fair trade
and reform.
You can watch it, and read the full-text, here: http://my.barackobama.com/competitiveness
What ideas do you have to keep America competitive in the years ahead?
Smart. Very smart. These people “get it.” They are using Web 2.0 in a very inclusive, forward-thinking way; the mere fact that they’re posing such a question in a professional forum means that they are reaching out to business professionals in an unprecedented way.
Again, I’m going to have to get back to this in a later post, but it’s tying into what I call the “Help Line Mollification Effect.” You know – how you dial customer support, mashing the buttons on your phone with excessive force, blood pressure up around nuclear reactor containment sphere levels … and you yowl at the poor schlub on the other end … until he helps you out and gently leads you through the answer … and by the end of the call, after the problem is resolved, you feel like a total ass, and want to send him something from his Amazon wishlist. Or is that just me?
Look folks, a lot of the anger simmering under the surface of our society is because everyone feels that no one is listening. The fact that Obama & his people are actually reaching out to people – well, hell. That’s disarming. It breaks down the resistance – that whole “Obama is a dangerous socialist who’s going to destroy the country with his hippie/commie ways” meme that’s been festering on the internets. It kinda says, “Hey, if you’ve got a great idea on how to fix things, let’s hear it.”
Who knows? Maybe the answer is that all of us are indeed smarter than any of us, and that out of this question will arise some fantastic new strategy that will restore the U.S. to greatness.
Or a buncha Digg kids will all get together, rig the question-answering, and we’ll wind up with an army of giant killer robots that all look like Lara Croft.
…some might say the train has already left the station on that one… Not sure what it is that’s behind this announcement. Perhaps someone at Google belatedly came to the realization that without newspapers, there’s no real fresh content on the web, and thus nothing for Google to sell its ads against? Schmidt was short [...] [...more]
…some might say the train has already left the station on that one…
Not sure what it is that’s behind this announcement. Perhaps someone at Google belatedly came to the realization that without newspapers, there’s no real fresh content on the web, and thus nothing for Google to sell its ads against? Schmidt was short on specifics as to how it is that Google plans to “help,” but this graf has got to make business managers cringe:
Still, he acknowledged the boost probably won’t be enough to restore the hefty profit margins that newspaper publishers historically have enjoyed from print advertising.
Interestingly, later in the story, Schmidt continues to bang the drum for its mobile advertising platform, Android. Now, I’ve been looking into online advertising pretty thoroughly for the last three months, and I gotta say, predicting that Google is going to make more money from mobile than from the web within five years … well, I want some of what he’s been smoking.
Then again, not too many people have made fortunes lately by betting against Google. And yeah, I realize that what he’s doing is banging the drum for a very expensive product that Google has poured resources into, in the hopes that the market will catch the hype virus, and start migrating their ads to mobile. If anyone thinks that Google is going to have an easy time recovering their investment from Android, well, check out the ROI numbers (if you can find them) for YouTube. Have they really managed to monetize all the vids there yet? Magic 8-ball says “Answer Cloudy – Ask Again Later.”
Not sure if I want to have to make sure that my hair is all on the correct tangent from my head, and that there’s no broccoli in my teeth before participating in my next online pie-fight in the comments section of Sadly, No! Then again, it’s only a matter of time before people start [...] [...more]
Not sure if I want to have to make sure that my hair is all on the correct tangent from my head, and that there’s no broccoli in my teeth before participating in my next online pie-fight in the comments section of Sadly, No!
Then again, it’s only a matter of time before people start offering plug-ins to do the video commenting, and we get animated snowmen (like in the CNN Democratic debate last summer), World of Warcraft avatars or Second Life furries chiming in …
Anyway, check out Seesmic – the webnoscenti are saying that it’s the "next Twitter" – which I guess, means that all the early adopters will ooh and aah over it, as it suffers weekly outages from lack of scalability, while the rest of the webmob blithely ignores it in favor of seeing the latest Pirate Bay porno.
UPDATE: It appears that there is a use for this – Jemima Kiss at the Guardian, used it to interview Spielberg, Lucas and Harrison Ford.
"It’s a simple
enough idea but incredibly exciting; I just posted a few direct
questions to Spielberg and Karen Allen (Marian was always one of my
favourite heroines) and it’s quite a buzz watching them reply directly
to your own questions. Seesmic is quite intimate too – like most
people, I just use my webcam and was still wearing my pyjamas when I
recorded. But hey, pyjamas have a good internet heritage."
Can you say “Doomed”? Apparently, a report called “And Now for the News,” written by Craig Moffett of Bernstein Research, came out this week, and it’s got both Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, and, not coincidentally, HDNet, and the pundits at Digital Media Wire all atwitter over the stark economic realities. Cuban made [...] [...more]
Can you say “Doomed”?
Apparently, a report called “And Now for the News,” written by Craig Moffett of Bernstein Research, came out this week, and it’s got both Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, and, not coincidentally, HDNet, and the pundits at Digital Media Wire all atwitter over the stark economic realities.
Cuban made billions of dollars in the internet video game, and, while he’s acted the fool at various Maverick games over the years, nobody has ever accused him of either being stupid or lacking passion. So when he starts winding up the air-raid siren, it gets my attention.
Starting with the disappointing but expected news that journalism is no
longer a service consumers desire to pay for, he moves on to the
problems facing Internet video.
(snip)
Five years into the video-over-the-Internet revolution, we have learned
two things. First; consumers won’t pay for content on the web, so it
will have to be ad supported. And second; it won’t be ad supported.
Oh, shit. (*stomach lurches*)
On the web, early evidence suggests that consumers will tune out –
click away – if they are forced to watch more than 30 seconds or so of
advertising up front, and maybe another 90 seconds of advertising over
the next thirty minutes. Hulu.com, for example, which has already been
lionized by many as the future of TV, serves two minutes of advertising
for every 22 minutes of programming(i.e. the programming duration of a
typical half hour show from television). Assuming identical CPMs for
web video and TV, and after accounting for lost affiliate fees, a 30
minute program on the web with two minutes of advertising yields
approximately 1/8th as much revenue per viewer.
Are content producers prepared to reduce production costs…by 88%?
In fact, the actual economics of web-based video are far, far worse than this.
Sweetie, can you get me a hemlock cocktail, please? Easy on the ice. And see if there are any razor blades in the junk drawer?
88%? Are you freakin’ kidding me? That kind of revenue restructuring would be in line with what newspapers have experienced since classified ads migrated to the web (i.e. the “Craigslist effect”). And yeah, I know, there are some shellshocked newspaper reporters/editors who will nod wearily, taking schadenfreude satisfaction that the arrogant pacotillos in local TV are about to take the bollocking that print has taken these last 10 years.
Over at Digital Media Wire, Paul Sweeting explains the problem that video producers here in Hollywood face, seeing as how they’re making the same goddam mistakes that music labels made when the internet came calling:
There’s no reason to believe that video producers’ experience will be
any different. Like it or not, the web simply isn’t very kind to
publishers, packagers and distributors. It rewards enablers. Search is
an enabling technology–perhaps the ultimate enabling technology. And
as Google shareholders can tell you, it’s been rewarded. The challenge
for publishers is not to figure out how to force the web to reward
them. It’s to figure out how to capture the value created by enabling
technology.
In that sense, Cuban is right. It may not make sense for the networks
simply to make their schedules available for free on the Internet. That
doesn’t really create any new value; it mostly just drains value from
linear platforms.
What the networks need is to figure out how to capture the value
created by enabling consumers to access, select, aggregate, transform,
embed and share content–in a word, to use it. Anything else is just TV with buffering.
For scripted TV entertainment, well, I’m not sure what the survival strategy is yet. I do know that there is not much love in the ad world for a CPM rate hike for online video that would bridge that 88% gap. There’s just too much other product out there screaming for attention … not to mention the fact that the scripted TV content (and movie content, for that matter) is a melting sandcastle to the surging broadband tide. Trying to make back a $160 million budget from some exotic cocktail of online subscription, advertising and branded sponsorship … well, let’s just say that I’m glad I’m not writing the checks on that one. I don’t know how you can possibly monetize the budgets that Hollywood is used to.
And folks, we know – dammit, we know all too well – how the media megalopalies react to revenue reductions. For a time, they throw money at the problem. And then come the cutbacks. “We have to do more with less.”
It comes down to our old friends, supply and demand. If there is
demand for the kind of spectacle that you get in Iron Man or Raiders 4,
or whatever, there will be someone out there that will supply it …
but at the price point that the people on the demand side set.
Kiss those expense-account lunches at The Ivy goodbye. All the little perks that pampered writers, directors, producers and stars have gotten used to over the years. There is going to be a lot of screaming and whining hereabouts in the next decade or so.
I think that my clients over in newspapers have actually got a significant advantage in this arena. The future of video is going to be like the future of news: disaggregated and hyperlocal. Papers can do this. Papers ARE doing this.
I can’t figure out how to take a 2 1/2 hour piece of video – hell, video of any length, from a blipvert to the entire back catalog of the Museum of Radio and TV – and make it pay off a $320 million opening weekend return.
But I can teach you how to monetize short clips shot by reporters that go along with local news stories. That’s do-able. One last thing: in the comments was this gem, sure to be included in my next series of trainings for newspapers migrating to video on the web:
I’ve never seen ABC.com and the rest put an RSS, Email, or text message subscribe/alert button on their video pages. Instead they want us all to *remember* show schedules, come back, and sit through ads. They’re blowing a huge chance to have a relationship with the audience. The sad truth is that TV networks don’t want a relationship. They want us all to sit around the glowing box together on *their* schedule as if it were 1966.
As someone who has spent much, much more than my share of time being hassled by cops for doing my job, face jammed onto the hot, stinking hood of a patrol car, I felt it necessary just to acknowledge this protest event being held at Hollywood & Highland on June 1. More and more, I [...] [...more]
As someone who has spent much, much more than my share of time being hassled by cops for doing my job, face jammed onto the hot, stinking hood of a patrol car, I felt it necessary just to acknowledge this protest event being held at Hollywood & Highland on June 1.
More and more, I find that the police have been infected by the “well, we’re just trying to be cautious” bug, spread by the geeks at Homeland Security that show up every six months with their PowerPoints demonstrating how the eeee-vil Mooslim terr’rists are going to set of a nuke right here in River City if the beat cops slack up even for a second. Sheesh. Mostly, the induced paranoia is nothing more than a fig leaf for some overzealous freaks to throw their weight around.
So yeah, join the group, send some supportive e-mails, whatever it takes. Taking a picture in a public place is not a crime. Should not be a crime. Idiots that want to clamp down on people obeying the law because they feel justified … that is the bigger danger to our republic.
I particularly liked this question from the comments on the blog: “what if a bunch of art students sat down and sketched a public place? would that be a crime?”
This image of a shirt was posted on Flickr – go there and join the group, even if you don’t plan to show up
All the shallow thinkers seemed to draw from Vietnam was that the brave military could have "won" that war, had not the craven, cowardly, hate-America-first media not stabbed them in the back. So in our most recent misadventure in Iraq, the military set out from the outset to muzzle, coerce, co-opt and neuter the media. [...] [...more]
So in our most recent misadventure in Iraq, the military set out from the outset to muzzle, coerce, co-opt and neuter the media. That was Job One, and they spent billions of dollars and millions of man-hours making sure that their talking points were crammed down the throats of any media outlet. The recent NY Times investigation revealed just how much all the "analysts" were being fed useless, false and ultimately harmful propaganda. In a recent Miami Herald article, Ed Wasserman convincingly argues that the media is going to have to self-police to rid itself of hacks disguised as objective, independent observers:
Some of the analysts confessed that to avoid displeasing their Pentagon patrons they choked back misgivings they had about administration claims of steady military gains.
One Fox News analyst came back from a trip and told his viewers, ”You can’t believe
the progress.” Actually, he told The Times, “I saw immediately in 2003 that things were going south.”
The report is based on 8,000 pages of documents that the administration spent two years fighting demands to disclose. It describes a cozy arrangement involving more than 75 retired military who consulted for Fox News, NBC, CNN and other networks with round-the-clock cable operations. Few of those operations made much effort to find out whether their analysts were benefiting from the policies they zealously defended.
It’s true, as Glenn Greenwald wrote on Salon, that “news organizations were hardly unaware that these retired generals were mindlessly reciting the administration
line on the war and related matters. To the contrary, that’s precisely
why our news organizations turned to them in the first place.”
Here’s a line of thinking – I hesitate to use the word "fact," since the Pentagon and the current administration have so discredited even the concept of "facts" – that I hope some of the brighter minds in the military arrive at: all the relentless bright & happy talk, the insistence on "progress is being made," the demands to blindly support our troops, the devotion to this vision of the U.S. military as an "Ever-Victorious Army," wreathed in golden glory, incapable of making a mistake …
…all that propaganda and denial of tough examination of exactly what was going on, where we were headed …
… that effort to castrate the media and control the message is what is going to ultimately going to be responsible for the disaster in Iraq. I talked last night to a formerly wild-eyed right-winger, who works with/for/in the military, and he admitted that it’s just a matter of time before we have the helicopters taking off from the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, just like Saigon in ’75.
If the military had acknowledged in the years 2003-2006 that perhaps things were not quite going exactly according to plan, that there were flaws in the Great Sacred Rumsfeld’s Master Plan, then perhaps, hmmm, I dunno, adjustments could have been made to that plan. Adjustments that have since been made.
Adjustments that would have saved American lives. Adjustments that would have stemmed or even reversed the disintegration of Iraqi society that has led us to the dead end where we now find ourselves.
Truthful reports in the media would have put pressure on the politicians above to change the plan rather than the insistence on "staying the course" despite the (OK, I’ll say it) fact that course was heading right straight off the cliff.
Here’s a last quote, ringing out from the lessons that should have been learned – were learned by Colin Powell, since he was in Vietnam, ignored by Cheney and Bush since they were not:
The armed forces contributed to their own defeat in Vietnam ”by fighting the war they wanted to fight rather than the one at hand.”
(snip)
In the end it all boils down to one question: Could we have won a military victory in Vietnam? Record’s answer is: Yes, but not at any price even remotely acceptable to the American people.
One thoughtful former infantry battalion commander told me he had reflected long and
hard about what would have resulted from unlimited war, including an invasion of North Vietnam: ”We could have won a military victory without question. But today my sons and yours would still be garrisoning Vietnam and fighting and dying in an unending guerrilla
war.” The war was ours to lose, and we did; it was for the South Vietnamese to win, and they could not.
In case all you gringoes up in Gringolandia missed it, last week the controversial (I use that adjective, because a diatribe this early in the post of negative adjectives just isn’t nice) Hugo Chavez got slapped down by King Juan Carlos of Spain. During a meeting in front of God and TV cameras, Chavez was [...] [...more]
In case all you gringoes up in Gringolandia missed it, last week the controversial (I use that adjective, because a diatribe this early in the post of negative adjectives just isn’t nice) Hugo Chavez got slapped down by King Juan Carlos of Spain. During a meeting in front of God and TV cameras, Chavez was being his usual ridiculous, Mussolini-esque self, interrupting the Spanish minister and playing the fool.
The King leaned over and snarled, "Porque no te callas?" – "Why don’t you just shut up."
The Spanish-speaking world erupted.
Many love the King for saying in blunt language what they wish someone would have said a long time ago to that blubbery-lipped bozo. Many hate the King for what they see as typical peninsulare/gachupine arrogance, a resentment that stretches all the way back to the colonial days.
All I know is that in Ibague, the bubbly young girls on staff told me about this video, and searched YouTube until they found it, and now I can’t get that damn song out of my head. So here it is – and kudos to the Flash animators who stuck Hugo and the King’s heads on these dancers/kung-fu fighters/chickens. The fact that they got this up within days of the incident – and that the song that they set this music to was already a hit (and one of the fave greetings that the hip kids in San Salvador use to greet each other is "Porque no to callas")… well, the mash-up talent is definitely catching on in a global way.
Because surfing the Internet is like drinking from a firehose, David LaFontaine braves the torrent to tell you what trends and technologies to gulp down, swirl in your mouth, or spit out.
RT @saleemkhan: @ICFJKnight 2222ET I think your Twitter account has been compromised. Either that, or you've changed your focus to mirac ... 3 hours ago
RT @anamariecox: RT @pourmecoffee: This is the 20th GOP debate. If you have your card stamped for all of them, you can redeem it for a m ... 6 hours ago
Experience=disadvantage, I guess RT @Karoli: Ron Paul calls Rick Santorum a fake for actually participating in government. #cnndebate6 hours ago
Guardian Journalist 
More and more, I find that the police have been infected by the “well, we’re just trying to be cautious” bug, spread by the geeks at Homeland Security that show up every six months with their PowerPoints demonstrating how the eeee-vil Mooslim terr’rists are going to set of a nuke right here in River City if the beat cops slack up even for a second. Sheesh. Mostly, the induced paranoia is nothing more than a fig leaf for some overzealous freaks to throw their weight around. 
