When TV Listens To Its Viewers, Amazing Things Happen
April 28, 2008
I’ve spent quite a bit of time looking at ways news organizations can connect and interact with their viewership. This morning I was greeted by a basic, but excellent interaction on Good Morning America.
I’ve got ABC turned on in my hotel room this morning for background noise and they ran a story about the upcoming issue of Vanity Fair which has some photographs of Miley Cyrus (Story here) scantily clad. Cyrus is a huge Disney made and owned child start at only 15. As always, the GMA web site is open to comments on stories, and they actively solicit “editorial” based feedback via email as well.
It’s now 8am EDT and the original story aired no more than 30 minutes ago, there are already 150+ comments on the story from people pro and against the photos and dolling out advice. This level of immediate feedback and interaction is awesome! What’s more, just a few minutes ago the Good Morning America talking heads came back from a commercial break and spent 30 seconds discussing the comments they were seeing on their web site.
This interaction and discussion online, and on-air has tremendous power, and I hope that it’s something your news organization is open to or considering doing.
Why It’s PayPal’s Fault, Not The Browser
April 27, 2008
About a week ago there was some buzz floating around about how PayPal may block Safari because it doesn’t have phishing protection built in. This has since been retracted by PayPal:
PayPal: No plans to block Safari
A representative for PayPal on Friday said the ecommerce firm is developing features to block customers from logging into PayPal when using obsolete browsers on outdated or unsupported operating systems, but has no intention of blocking Safari as a company white paper seemed to imply.
“An example of such a browser/OS combination might be, for example, Internet Explorer 4 running on Windows 98,” said spokesperson Michael Oldenburg. “In doing so, we better protect our customers from viewing a phishing site through their browser. We have absolutely no intention of blocking current versions of any browsers, including Apple’s Safari, from our website.”
(Nugget by AppleInsider)
Might I suggest that it’s not the browser’s responsibility to block security threats on particular web sites? Maybe it’s my not-liking of blaming others for your own problems but I believe that PayPal and PayPal only is responsible for their own PayPal.com site. It’s their job to keep their customers safe, not browser developers, or any other type of web application developer.
Sure, I have a little bit of a bias here. I used to be a large (in my mind) PayPal merchant, who ditched all that in favor of better customer service elsewhere. I know I’m not alone in that boat. However, I feel the same way when eBay blames Apple or denies support of the site if you’re using Safari on eBay.
(Wait a second, I may be on to something here, both PayPal and eBay are owned by eBay and both were virtually run into the ground under Meg Whitman).
To close out this ranting post, let me say that I fully support web application developers and browser developers who want to protect their own customers from the dark side of the Internet, but I don’t think the fault and responsibility should lie on their shoulders as opposed to a multi-national corporation who certainly has the tools and resources available to help themselves help the world but chooses not to.
links for 2008-04-26
April 26, 2008
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Is Twitter worth $150 million?
Twitter, A Journalist’s Best Friend
April 25, 2008
Here’s a little nugget and inspiration I’d love to get some feedback from the masses on:
Mollom - Spam Control and More
April 24, 2008
I came across this service a little earlier in the week and can’t wait to give it a try! It is quite possibly the first real competitor to Akismet for community spam filtering and control. The Drupal community is all up in arms with praise for the beta-service.
Sometime next week I think I’ll toss it onto one of my Drupal sites and see how it does for a while. While I’ve been pretty happy with Akismet (which I use on this site), competition is always a good thing and everyone likes to detect and delete spam.
What appears to be the claim to fame with Mollom is that learns from it’s mistakes and your content. Apparently one of the features in the pipe is content filtering, like nuking inappropriate language from community sites. While the community sites that I’ve managed haven’t had much of a language problem, those things do happen and varying defense levels certainly help to quell managerial fear.
If you’ve used http://mollom.com/javascript:mctmp(0); let me know your thoughts.
How I Exercise My Mind
April 23, 2008
Because I’m constantly connected to real people as well as the Internet it can be difficult sometimes to keep your mind sharp and on focus. I’m not perfect in that regard, that’s for sure. But I do try to keep a fairly clean calendar with important events and conversations.
In addition to my email and calendar practices I also do some other things to try to stay ahead of my mind. For instance, I regularly check my RSS reader to stay current on news and information in topic areas that I’m interested in.
But staying sharp isn’t just staying organized, I also try to get out and walk or run several times a week. I’m not always successful but I do certainly feel a lot better about my workload, stress, and well being after being physically active.
My Nintendo DS also helps to keep me on top of my game, I enjoy taking a quick break now and again to play some Brain Age, or Big Brain Academy. The DS is the first video game system that I’ve purchased in quite a while (although the Wii is awful fun to play if someone else has the equipment).
Ok so this post actually ended up being shorter than you might think, what things to do you do in order to stay sharp and focused?
links for 2008-04-22
April 22, 2008
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Has anyone tried this yet? I’m adding it to my list to check out.
On Email Organization
April 22, 2008
For the last month or so I’ve been on a rampage, an email rampage. I haven’t quite hit Inbox Zero but inbox 30-40 suits me well actually. Here’s what I’ve done:
- I now have only 2 visible email addresses, Gmail and my @jonathancoffman.com mail. Those other addresses (.Mac, Yahoo!, Mizzou, and my secondary Gmail) all now get picked up by my primary Gmail account, this way I only have two inboxes to check, and hopefully by responding to those with only one address I gradually get fewer and fewer messages going to those other addys.
- Combining the last two addresses, my primary gmail and my domain email isn’t yet feasible. I can’t quite take myself down to that level yet. Because they’re used for two very different purposes (personal and professional) the use cases will remain mutually exclusive for the time being.
- The downside to still having two inboxes: two sets of gmail tags/folders. My domain email is handled by GoogleApps (which I love by the way), so for now I have two identical but disconnected sets of tags.
- Account and Login Information
- Banking
- Bills
- Blog Conversations
- Contributr
- Current Projects
- Pipeline Projects
- Coupons and Discounts
- Job Hunting
- Journalism School
- Newsletters
- Personal (family)
- Private Betas
- Product Orders
- Service Orders
- Require followup
- Servers and Hosting
- Social Media
- Travel
- URGENT
New Research on Premium Branding
April 21, 2008
This weekend I got the chance to sit down and read some of the huge stack of magazines that I previously hadn’t had time to read. I certainly didn’t make it through all of them, but a couple caught my eye. One of the most recent ones is the April 28th edition of Business Week.
One of the first things I noticed was that they are really trying to be trendy in their page design. They’ve got highlighting, charts and fly-aways, and some interesting section headings (like BTW). Since this is the first time I’ve noticed these things, I guess that tells you how often I read Business Week. It’s no fault of their own, magazines just aren’t as high a priority as working through the 1000+ headlines in my RSS reader in the evening (I often cheat and hit “mark all as read” if in general the headlines aren’t grabbing my attention in any particular folder of feeds).
But back to the post at hand, in this week’s BTW there is a short blurb about premium branding. As in, another researcher just did the old “wine tasting” test again. Where essentially they blindfold people and tell them they’re trying a $5 bottle of wine, and then a $45 bottle of wine… People inevitably choose the $45 bottle as tasting better even though the wine came from the same inexpensive bottle.
It’s a nasty trick for those of us easily influenced by marketing. But it illustrates something larger, since people still respond to premium branding. Shouldn’t you be interested in branding yourself as a top-shelf whatever you are?
I think that in the age of personal, and professional branding that more attention should be paid to finding out what makes a brand premium or not on the web. Is it different than in the brick and mortar world? What makes an online brand premium? I would argue that it’s easier to “fake” a premium brand on the Internet. If by image alone, the raw talent of the magnificent graphic designers and writers out there should be able to pull off a premium distinction.
That’s not to say that consumers on the Internet are more more susceptible to being abused, in fact customer service and having the solid foundation to support a premium brand is harder to fake. People using the Internet for research, entertainment, or learning gain the skills necessary to figure out “fake” premium brands. There is no long-term shortcut. As in the brick and mortar world, your image can get your foot in the door but it’s your content and substance that makes the sale.
A Personal Update
April 19, 2008
Today’s post has two different themes, 1) a change in blog format and 2) my job search.
I wanted to start out by saying that I’ve changed the way things work on here a little. After getting several emails, I re-evaluated having my Twitter updates archive to my blog. I’ve decided that there isn’t very much value derived from having those posts reposted here.
This blog and my Tweets fill very different needs and have very different value. I have decided that while having a searchable archive of my Tweets here was nice for me, it really wasn’t providing very much value to you, my valued readers. I’ve disabled the cross-posting of Tweets on this blog until a better solution crops up.
In the meantime, be sure to Follow me on Twitter. About two weeks ago I hit 300 followers on Twitter and am now proud to be followed by nearly 350 people. Thank you so much for your support and I hope that you enjoy the insight and knowledge that I share with the community.
On another personal note, you may have noticed that my blogging has been inconsistent as of late. This is a short-term situation and I hope to resume normal daily posting very soon. As you know, I’ve been actively seeking full-time employment, and looking is nearly a full-time job. Normally I would be writing daily and scheduling posts a day or two ahead of schedule about ideas, thoughts, and conversations happening. However, I don’t want to jeopardize any of the opportunities coming down the pipe.
I’ve already had to make some tough decisions, and there will be no shortage of more difficult decisions for at least the next several weeks. As I make those decisions and finalize plans, I will post some information from the numerous conversations I’ve been having with wonderful people across the country on the future of information and knowledge distribution (formerly known as the news business).
If you haven’t already, I’d like to invite you to subscribe to my blog via email by using the form in the right-side column or by adding my RSS feed to your feed reader.
