So, since the people have had their very own broadcast medium, every indiscreet, accidental nudity moment has been chronicled on the World Wide Web – from wardrobe malfunctions to topless beaches to falling bikini tops to private recordings in the wrong hands to completely faked Photoshopped fantasy pics to pre-fame-to-further-my-career-only shoots to whoopsy-getting-out-of-an-expensive-car-I-accidentally-showed-you-my-

mommy-parts.

The Paparazzi follow Britney around in decadent, disgusting, depraved swarms, documenting her every move. Yet, no matter how many reports of completely unabashed nudity surface, forgive my forthcoming country-ness, ain’t nobody got a picture of it nowhere.

Not that we should. And not that I’m condoning such behavior or necessarily looking anymore – when she was freshly adorned in schoolgirl outfits and pretending innocence and wholesomeness, the Internet couldn’t get enough and hoped and prayed and begged that one day they’d get lucky and see what MTV wouldn’t show us but Playboy would, even if she refused to do Playboy. At one point in time Britney Spears was a real Jessica Alba.

That’s not the argument  — whether or not we should be presented with the photos or that we should want to see them. I just find it strange that the Internet that has, celebrity or not, splashed sex in front of us at every corner possible, depicting every disturbing deviance imaginable (2 girls 1 cup, anyone?), whether we sought it out or not has failed to produce a truly disrobed Britney all this time despite all of her public nudity.

It’s like the Internet has become some kind of Britney twilight zone. Sure, the pics of Britney (and Lindsay and Paris) getting out a car sans underwear circulated, but they weren’t exactly attractive – those types of scenes generally aren’t – but were kinda unsettling and most of us felt pretty dirty for even looking just once.

But let’s review, shall we?

There are pictures of Britney in a swimming pool making out with a stranger and she is topless. The photos are very Inside Edition friendly, cleavage up. A supposed topless Britney peaks out from behind a dressing room curtain and there’s one snapshot, which is grainy and nondescript. When the cops come to Britney’s house during her custody battle meltdown, she reportedly came out topless and put on a see-through nightgown to cover up. She hung out with a bunch of strippers one night at a strip club and played dress-up with them. And let’s not forget she was caught on video pantsless on a balcony with a paparazzi beau, went swimming in just her underwear in front of everyone, and was pantsless at a club with Paris Hilton.

Most recently – Sunday, actually – Britney was reported to go on a shopping spree with Adnan Paparazzi Whatshisface, where the two of them disappeared into a dressing room, and made "strange noises" before Britney came out stark naked to look at clothes despite the protests from store employees.

We might say she really likes being naked and doesn’t care who sees her. And no pictures anywhere? No camera phones. No nothing.

The Internet, for perhaps the first time, has really let us down. Not that it matters anymore. I think many of us are over her, even if there’s been a place on the Internet for everything else.

Not that I’m looking. Really. 
   
 

“We saw a 6 fold increase in the share of US Internet searches for ‘gas prices’ last week and the term hit its highest peak since May,” reported Hitwise’s Heather Hopkins.  As a result, she “decided to focus on who is concerned most about rising gas prices using our demographic and lifestyle data.”

So what group led the way with its worries?  Old folks who were once able to pay $.25 per gallon?  Parents whose children might wind up spending $10 per teaspoon?  No and not necessarily, according to Hopkins’s look at GasBuddy.com.

Hopkins wrote, “Affluent Suburbia and Small Town Contentment, the two groups most likely, according to offline statistics collected by Experian, to own three or more cars were two of the three groups over-indexed on the GasBuddy.com website.”

She later continued, “The third group that was over-indexed on GasBuddy.com was Struggling Societies.  Households in this group were 164% more likely to be on the website than average for the online population – and accounted for 21% of the website’s visits in the past four weeks.  This group is more likely than average to own one small car.”

For the poorer members of our society, that doesn’t sound good.  On the bright side, it’s easier to improve the fuel efficiency of one small car than a fleet of luxury sedans.

If you haven’t, then you didn’t pay enough attention in Bible school (if you went). King Solomon said that (maybe pseudopigraphically; I’ll give you that one). Flip forward a few hundred pages in that book you’ve let get dusty and you’ll notice people have never been all that nice. The last guy that told us to be nice to each other got himself killed for it.

Ah, the Divine Irony.

Anyway, as I was saying, it seems to me the Internet might drill home long lost niceties, especially as more and more people get busted being jerks. Everybody’s got a camera phone these days, or a blog, or a MySpace profile.

Do you think these teachers would have behaved differently if they’d known their fiery tempers were about to be posted on YouTube? (Well, the one teacher seems aware he’s being recorded and waves; there’s always one.) Maybe they would have taken a deep breath before letting their frustrations get the best of them.

Maybe the CEO of Spirit Airlines wouldn’t have been quite so dismissive of customer dissatisfaction if he’d known his remarks would be plastered across the Internet.

Maybe "lazy alcoholic" drug-doing parents would shape up before their kid posted their dirty laundry on his blog. (I know, I know. That’s probably too optimistic – they’ll just keep their debauchery in another room or teach their kids about loose lips and sinking ships.)

On the bright side though, the Web makes for a nice place to fight back, giving the voiceless a real voice in the world. A community college chancellor tried to silence criticism by banning blogs on campus, only to get a lot more attention than he would have gotten if he’d just left it alone to scab over.

So, maybe…maybe there’s something to this idea that the Web will become some kind of societal regulator – either that or a 24/7 Jerry Springer episode. 

The Internet’s Making Us Shy?

But they did talk to ah, um…hang on, I have to look at it again…a psychologist, Harvard Business School researcher, and etiquette columnist. What, no chemist/librarian/TV chef to talk to?

Just joshing, I’m sure Ms. Robin Abrahams is more qualified than I am, and is much, much more familiar with the topic. She says the increasingly internal and textual world thrust upon society by the Internet and associated technologies is making people shyer, as the percentage of people that report being shy increased from 40 percent to about half.

From the Daily Telegraph‘s report:

"People shop online, they listen to their iPods rather than the radio  — and they e-mail or text each other rather than talk.

"What we have is an increasingly complex social environment, combined with less practice at dealing with it because of technology.”

And that’s causing everybody to be put on meds, rah rah Prozac.

TechDirt CEO Mike Masnick, ever the cynic, says, "It would be nice to see this backed up with a little more than just the fact that more people self-report being shy — though, it’s certainly possible that these gadgets do put up a shield that prevents people from getting over shyness."

Or maybe it’s just overcompensation, a silent apology, for all the times they’ve been jerks in comment sections. Oh no, is that Sunshine1289? Shoot, shoot, shoot! You think she knows I’m the dude that said she looked like a horse kicked her?

Or you could just link to the Irish Cancer Society, or even to the group’s link request form, anyway.  With a reference that Monty Python fans should immediately recognize, Jennifer Laycock asked the Irish Cancer Society, “What Are You Gonna Do…Bleed on Me?”

To be fair, the link request form seems designed to protect the group’s reputation – and the Irish Cancer Society does appear to be a respectable, fully functioning national charity.  Still, some of its terms of link use are a wee bit strange.

The very first one, for example, declares that “[a]ny text-only link must be clearly marked ‘Irish Cancer Society.’”  So, whether you were trying to praise the group or just call it a purple monkey dishwasher (as Richard Hearne did), the Irish Cancer Society would not want those words to link to it.

The second provision, that “[t]he link must point to the URL www.cancer.ie (i.e. the Society HomePage) and not to any other page within the Web site,” seems equally arbitrary.  Thanks to it, anyone trying to point you towards the disclaimer attached to the Irish Cancer Society’s message board would have to give you click-by-click directions instead of a simple link.

I can’t hold too much of a grudge against the group for this silliness – after all, the society works to stamp out cancer in the land of milk, honey, and Guinness.  But it seems like the Irish Cancer Society’s Webmaster could benefit from a trip or two to his local pub.

Blogosphere Responds To Death Threats

Any profession that operates within the public domain comes with its share of pitfalls. Blogging is no exception.

Sometimes criticism crosses appropriate boundaries. There’s certainly a tipping point between spirited disagreement and personal attack, something that popular blogger Kathy Sierra has unfortunately had to learn the hard way.

In her latest (and perhaps final) blog post, Sierra documents a series of attacks upon her by other bloggers at meankids.org and unclebobisms.com, both of which have since been taken offline. The textual assaults ranged from obscene death threats to extremely graphic depictions of misogynistic imagery created from actual photos of Sierra.

Sierra speculates on individuals that may have been responsible or contributed to the offending speech:

The "Bob’s Yer Uncle" site was supposedly started by Cluetrain co-author Chris Locke (who, along with Jeaneane Sessum, also authors the Kat Herding Media site) and included most of the same members as meankids.

I don’t know which participant actually made the picture. It may have been Joey, or Chris Locke, or perhaps Allen Herrel.

Locke, however, was none too happy that his name was mentioned in the list of suspects. In his response to Kathy’s post, he makes some pretty bold statements about the way Kathy is handling the matter:

I found some of what was written on the meankids and unclebobism sites in extremely bad taste, yes. And as I said, I immediately took down the site when I saw Kathy’s understandably strong objections. I think her response, as it pertains to anything I personally wrote, was unjustified — but highly effective — character assassination. As a result, I’m sure I’ll be explaining for years to come that I’m not really an ax murderer and child molester. Nice work.

Despite Locke’s unhappiness with being caught up in this mess, there are some real issues to consider here.

First, this scenario is indicative of what can happen when you give people the luxury of complete anonymity. Bloggers try to make commenting as painless as possible, often removing registration requirements because they are seen as cumbersome to building conversations.

The downside, however, is that by allowing anonymous comments, you open up and entirely different can of worms.

Matthew Ingram gives his take on the nature of online anonymity:

It’s a little like the spell that comes over people when they get behind the wheel of a car. Because the other drivers can’t see them, and don’t know who they are, people feel free to say — and do — all kinds of terrible things they would never think of doing face-to-face.

Beyond anonymity, however, issues of gender equality are springing up in blogger responses to Sierra’s plight. Popular blogger Robert Scoble lends his own commentary concerning the treatment of females within online and tech related fields:

It’s this culture of attacking women that has especially got to stop. I really don’t care if you attack me. I take those attacks in stride. But, whenever I post a video of a female technologist there invariably are snide remarks about body parts and other things that simply wouldn’t happen if the interviewee were a man.

It makes me realize just how acerbic this industry and culture are toward women. This just makes me ill.

Are these attacks indicative of an underlying spirit of misogyny? Are women still viewed as weaklings, sex objects, and inferior to men? While females enjoy more civil rights than ever before, do they still have a long way to go before they can hope to achieve the same amount of personal respect and consideration that men are given?

These are tough questions that, at least after today, are difficult to answer with certainty.

The blogosphere backlash, however, has been anything but uncertain. Robert Scoble is refusing to blog for a week in protest of these threats. Many other prominent bloggers are crying for the heads of those responsible for perpetrating these attacks. In general, there is a spirit of outrage and disgust, but is the blogosphere overreacting?

Most bloggers endure their fair share of criticism. In this field, it’s pretty much a given that you’re just not going to see eye to eye with everyone, and many of those who disagree have no problem telling you just how wrong you are in a variety of different methods, some much more crass than others.

The truth, however, is that bloggers are public figures. Many have learned how to enjoy the success of their efforts, and have even come to accept that their popularity comes at the expense of privacy. But it seems that, at least in general, bloggers have been somewhat naïve about their positions as public figures. It comes with unfortunate side effects, like malicious threats and harmful imagery.

Perhaps this whole scenario will wake up the blogosphere to the fact that they aren’t magically immune to extreme criticism and hatemongering.

Kathy Sierra had not responded to requests for comment at the time of publication. 

In short films of two minutes or less contestants will answer the question, "What does green mean to you?" Those who participate in the contest can edit and submit films on Jumpcut between March 8- April 22. Over that period of time, viewers will be able to vote on films they find to be worthwhile. Up to ten films will be selected to be included in the final voting stage from April 26-May 6 where viewers can vote for the Audience Favorite.

"Yahoo! Video is one of the most creative groups the San Francisco Film Society has had the opportunity to work with," said Graham Leggat, executive director of the San Francisco Film Society. "We are very excited by their new ideas for filmmakers and film audiences and are looking forward to exploring with them the converging frontiers of film and digital technology."

The Grand Prize Winner will be presented with $1,000 prize and the Audience Favorite will be announced at the SFIFF50 Golden Gate Awards ceremony on Thursday, May 9. The two winning films will be screened and will also be available for viewing online at Jumpcut.

"As a leading online video destination, Yahoo! Video is constantly looking for opportunities to enhance the online video experience for our users." said Vince Broady, Head of Yahoo! Entertainment. "By partnering with the San Francisco Film Society, we are offering exciting, high-quality independent film content to our users within a branded experience. And by providing an online video editing platform through Jumpcut, we’ll empower our users to express "What it means to be green" through the power of video"

 Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Reddit | Furl

The conference proper gets underway tomorrow with a keynote by David Weinberbger. Among the sessions I’m anxious to attend:

• Jeffrey Treem, from Edelman‘s Change and Employee Engagement Group, on how top companies are using social media to engage employees
• John Cass and Zane Safrit on the role an organization’s culture plays on the adoption of social media for internal communications
• Katie Payne on measuring social media’s impact
• A panel discussion on the social meia press release moderated by Chris Heuer and featuring Todd Defren, Brian Solis, Tom Foremski, and Laura Sturaitis.
• David Parmet moderating a panel on managing crisis communications in the blogosphere
• Jeff DeCagna on applying Web 2.0 capabilities as a foundation for innovation
• Linda Zimmer, author of the “Businss Communicators of Second Life,” on (what else?) Second Life.
• JD Lasica on citizen-generated video
• Jen McClure, executive director of the Society for New Communication Research, moderating Steve Crescenzo (he who cannot be moderated) and Jeremy Wright for the presentation of “Winners and Sinners.” This one should be a hoot.

There are other great sessions and speakers, but with multiple tracks, you just can’t get to them all. But since my wrap-up keynote is supposed to provide an overview of the conference, I need to do my best to get to as many as possible, which should result in a flurry of posts on what I’ve heard here.

Attendance is well over 350, and things kick off in 45 minutes. Stand by…

Comments

Tag:

It’s amazing how much difference a few months makes.

This past Friday in Los Angeles, I participated in a panel discussing the “Brave New World of Social Media,” along with Jen McClure of the Society of New Communications Research and Eric Schwartzman of iPressroom.

This is the second time in the past six months that I discussed Social Media at a Bulldog Reporter event, each with a radically different outcome. You can read about my last experience here.

The last time I spoke in San Francisco, I found that most of the audience was completely unaware of tagging, flickr, Technorati, basic HTML, and the term social media in general.

Whereas in Los Angeles, the crowd – as a whole – was much more familiar with these tools simply because over time, they have been subjected to them as consumers, not so much as producers.

Some blog. More read them and also listen to podcasts. Several participate in social networks. Most have posted comments. Over half of the audience use Wikis. Many have used HTML limited to the confines of beautifying their Craigslist ads. While still basic, it served as a much more balanced foundation of where to start the discussion.

In fact, I had recommended to Bulldog that they create a breakout conference in the near future, which basically is a Social Media bootcamp to help communications professionals learn without publicly humiliating themselves or the companies they represent.

While the Los Angeles group was ready to engage, there was still much ground to cover – much more than we could possibly squeeze into an hour. However, their questions were many, and all related to how to participate, ethics of participation, and how to convince their bosses and clients to let them engage on behalf of their brands.

Interesting discussion indeed, and it could have continued if it wasn’t cut by the lunch bell. (Just a side note here, if anyone participated in this conference and you still have questions, please email me here.

My charter was to help explain Social Media as it pertains to the democratization of information and the tools that help people engage in conversations.

NOTE: I was not there to help people jump in and make a mockery out of, or exploit, the dynamic of Social Media.

I am one of the very few ambassadors who represent social media as a marketing professional, but also wish to protect it from the wide-eyed, motivated gold diggers looking to cash in.

In my presentation, I let PR people know that they are not invited to the party, because the industry thinks that they’re too stupid to participate. And, with very good reason. Yes, PR, as a whole, is too stupid to engage at this level, and more importantly, at any level that requires believable engagement.

Afterall we are spin doctors. We don’t get it. We can’t write. We like adjectives. We are simply spammers of information and not at all able to speak to influencers (or the people formerly known as the audience) because we’re too dumb to understand what we’re talking about and why it’s important. And, we try to always control the message.

All this because as an industry, we have not done a good job of PR for PR.

I was there to encourage the select few to participate without an agenda to help change this dreadful perception. I asked them to either engage as a person with passions, hobbies, and ideas and when ready, participate at a professional level because they are experts with valid ideas, questions, and perspective to contribute to their field.

Both activities will provide participants with the experience necessary to understand the infrastructure of social media and the respect required to remain in the dialogue. And more importantly, if you don’t have the expertise to contribute from a professional standpoint then don’t bother. And I’m not talking about PR, I’m speaking with reference to your understanding of the product and market related to the company you represent.

Either change professions or go back and learn so that you can not only participate in the social world of media, but also provide a more valuable and effective set of services and strategies to your company.

This is all about making professionals more successful in traditional public relations and in the brave new world of Social Media. They are both necessary and distinct in the strategies and tactics that drive each towards success.

At the end of the day, this is all about shifting from monologue to dialogue, and this powerful shift will take no prisoners but will yield many casualties.

This is about people, on both sides of the conversation – not audiences.

• Do not market to audiences or targets, engage in conversations
• Read
• Know what the hell you’re talking about
• Participate
• Contribute
• Be a resource, not a sales person
• Become part of the community
• Listen
• Learn
• Respect the communities you engage in and they will respect you

Afterall, transparent participation is one form of marketing – if it’s truly genuine. Direct PR and marketing will only continue to be shut out from the conversation Take the time to listen and learn in order to participate because only you can determine whether you rise or fall in this new age of communications.

Resources: Social Media Club, Social Media Collective, Society of New Communications Research

Comments

Part of that satisfactory user experience is created by the visual design of the product. The Montreal Gazette is obviously pleased that it has almost tripled the number of awards it gained in the annual Society For News Design (SND) international competition. The competition covers newspaper design, graphics and photography and the Gazette took 22 awards of excellence and one silver medal. Among Canadian newspapers, The Gazette placed third in the number of awards. La Presse won 43, including two silver medals, while the National Post won 38, including one silver. The Toronto Star won 21, and the Globe and Mail won 20. Congratulations are certainly in order.

It’s unfortunate that the SND does not include awards for user experience. The total user experience involves not only enjoying single well-designed pages but also moving around within the newspaper to find what you want. Unless a print newspaper does user studies, it many never know exactly how users rate their experience. Only if a reader is particularly irritated by the experience will they give feedback. Once someone has bought the newspaper, they’re on the hook. Having invested in the newspaper, they will soldier on and do the best they can.

The Montreal Gazette does have some fine individual pages. Often the front page is very attractive and may well encourage potential readers to buy the newspaper. Once having bought the newspaper, they may well find they are struggling with the navigation, particularly for the Saturday and Sunday editions.

Even though print newspapers may overlook usability (creating good user experiences), they cannot do so as they move to online versions. For online newspapers, the reader is not ‘locked in’ in the same way. If the user experience is not satisfactory, then competitive news sources are only a click away. Perhaps if the Society For News Design wishes to be relevant in future for online newspapers, then it may make eminent sense for it to add usability to its criteria for defining excellence.

Related: Website Usability and the Montreal Gazette

Comments

Tag:

Bookmark WebProNews: