Quotes for the week ending 31 January, 2009

“I’ve got one question: WTF? Where’s the funding?”

Student Tommy Bruce, president of the student-body at the University of Arizona, at the protest this week against state legislators slashing education budgets

“Our model is not for a quick rebound,” he said. “Our model is things go down, and then they reset.”

Steve Ballmer of Microsoft, in The New York Times, about the layoffs at Microsoft

“pop culture and media that’s ripe for parody”

Ralph Podell of Barely Digital, a new tech comedy model that will feature the ‘Obama Girl’

“It kind of smells like Nixon and Watergate.”

Governor Rod Blagojevich, invoking that other scandal of secret taping. The Governor was wire-tapped by the FBI which used it as evidence to bring charges on him.

“He’s all about PR.”

Christine Radongo, Senate Minority Leader of Illinois, commenting on the impeached governor Rod Blagojevich.

“Digging into work. Must turn off Facebook. Too distracting. So why am I now on Twitter? Argh!”

Corrine Heyeck, Tweeting about (what else?) the distraction of social media

 

Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich: media magnet

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow: “You  have handled this ordeal with a lot of political skill—so far.”

Yeah right!

Watching Rod Blagojevich self destruct on the public airways made me wonder if the former governor of Illinois was master of  the cottage industry -selling sound bites to the hungry media.

If you switched between channels on Tuesday it was wall-to-wall Blagojevich. From Larry King to NBC’s Nightline, to CNBC. He even managed to say the same things to the hosts, who alternated between inquisitor, cheerleader and mesmerized host.

So here’s my question. Does the media sometimes lose its journalistic compass and get sucked in by the bad guy (the old case of OJ comes to mind, doesn’t it?) or is this an instance of masterly media handling by Blagojevic?

Speaking of the cottage industry, check who else other than the TV hosts is making hay while the ex-governor heads to Crowbar Hotel.

 

Mortgaging, squeezing, railroading: running out of metaphors to describe education budget cuts

Laurie Roberts’ analysis of Arizona’s education cuts by myopic legislators, for once puts things in perspective. It also adds to the pile of colorful ways to describe what Arizona faces if it goes through with the proposed budget cuts.

Sure, everyone’s trying to do more with less, but more powerful than the metaphors is how a writer can put things in perspective:

“Put another way, the state would be supplying $358 less to educate today’s college student than it did 20 years ago. Adjusted for inflation, the state is kicking in roughly half of what it contributed 20 years ago.”

Of course she also notes that  “the ripest, juiciest and most available budget that can be squeezed” has always been the universities.

 

Then: Echo Chamber. Now: Think Tank

What’s the value of Twitter? I’m sure you get asked this question a lot. I’ve been barely active for the past six months, and find myself pointing people to resources such as this ebook (by GreekPreneur) and Chris Penn’s great Power Guide to Twitter.

I found the head-scratching by David Pogue (he, a tech columnist @ The New York Times) very enlightening. Even Pogue is figuring it out as he goes, so I don’t feel too bad.

Anyway, all this preamble is to make the point that Twitter to me is proving to be a customizable focus group that never sleeps; one I could configure with a  few clicks, so that it’s pretty well targeted.

I found a quick poll being taken at The Strategy Web, (try it!) and the instant result confirmed what I thought: More people have found it valuable as a think tank, than a reputation enhancer. The number of people it reflects is very small, so this is not exactly representative of the Twitterverse, but it vindicates my time spent.

 

Quotes for the week ending 24 January, 2009

“Citizen participation will be a priority…”

Macon Philips, White House’s director of new media, in a blog post a few seconds after Barack Obama took oath as the nation’s 44th president on Tuesday.

“Communication. Transparency. Participation”

The first message on the WhiteHouse.gov web site that switched over on Tuesday at noon., spelling out the details why ‘change has come to whitehouse.gov’

“an excellent example of witness media and pro media cooperation. It’s not about the ‘versus.’”

Steve Safran, quoted in an article about the evolution of ‘eyewittness journalism’

“Inaugural speeches serve two purposes. They are designed to heal whatever rough roads people had to go down to get elected. The other purpose is to lay out the agenda and the key metaphors for what’s to come-and hopefully to induce people to cooperate.”

John Adams, Colgate Speaking Union @Colgate University, quoted in Ragan.com

“You must find ways to spread – in a new manner – voices and pictures of hope, through the internet, which wraps all of our planet in an increasingly close-knitted way.”

Pope Benedict XVI, on the Vatican’s launch of a channel on YouTube.

“Obama gets a thumbs-up for his Blackberry.”

Headline of a series of articles that celebrated the fact that the ‘tech president’ gets his way in being able to step out of the communications bubble. Only a few people will have his email address, the White House says.

“Twitter IS a massive time drain. It IS yet another way to procrastinate … But it’s also a brilliant channel for breaking news, asking questions, and attaining one step of separation from public figures you admire.”

New York Times Tech columnist, David Pogue about how he’s learning to use Twitter

 

Faced with budget cuts, duct tape and cardboard box works!

Since it’s Friday, thought I’d share something far removed from the social media and marketing stuff you see here. Call it my glass-is-half-full story.

I work with people with an unusual skills at the Decision Theater. But how often do you find someone who could put together a home-made teleprompter? With nothing more than a cardboard box, a sheet of glass he pilfered from me, some buggy freeware, and a bit of duct tape, my colleague Dustin Hampton is ready to shoot a series of videos featuring simulated news reports.

The laptop makes the mirrored text scroll onto the flat screen monitor taped down at a 45-degree angle. It is then reflected up at the sheet of glass –on the other side of the camera you see here!

Yes, like everyone else in the state, the universities are facing budget cuts. But there’s work to be done. This project involves pandemic flu planning. I like to think of this as our way of not sitting back and waiting for the sun to rise.

(cross posting from LightBulb Moments)

 

Will Clinton’s push for ‘smart power’ bring networked diplomacy?

At the heart of diplomacy, says incoming Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (speaking at her visit to the State Department yesterday) is smart power. I trust this is not as something analogous to ‘soft power.’  To me smart power would be all about taking diplomacy into a 3.0 world. We all understand what 2.0 stands for, since this thinking debuted three years ago.

Like web 3.0 thinking (see Google’s Eric Schmidt take a crack at it), the folks looking at how to engage in diplomacy 3.0 would do well to understand how information, ideas, even value systems move virally across networks. They would do well to look at a paper that was written by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, titled ‘Network Diplomacy.” Amazingly, it was written in 2001! It’s about networked intelligence, dialogues, listening, sharing and trust.

Much of what it talked about is more or less accepted now in business and public relations –and only grudgingly in diplomacy. I say this because I asked a friend at a State Dept agency about networking and he said they were disallowed from joining networks for security reasons. That didn”t seem right since I know from closely tracking Dipnote, how engaged and networked some of them were.

Rules against networking existed in the murky 1.0 world. Where we locked down our employees, and monitored what links they clicked on, and then blamed them for not sharing knowledge or having rotten data. Or as they called it in the intelligence 1.0 era, for having ‘faulty intelligence.’

Back to the Carnegie paper, it observes that networks trump hierarchies, and that foreign policy is not just a sum-total of discrete events but an ongoing global engagement. To this end,

“networks are able to bring together much broader communities to flexibly address problems in ways that hierarchies often cannot.”

Let’s hope we see ‘smart power’ grids roll out fast!

 

Dire warning against dumbing down education in Arizona

As soon as details about budget cuts affecting education in the state (K-12 funding to be cut by $ 900 million, state university funding by $243 million) became known, the voices calling for such short-sighted actions have begun growing.

A few students put together a Facebook group, and an information-rich web site at SpeakUpNow.org

It includes a short video on Vimeo - watch this, links to members of the state legislature, and other ways to get more voices be heard.

I write about this not just to track how social media is being used to bring people together for a common cause. I have a personal stake in this. I work at Arizona State University, one of the three universities that will be forced to take drastic steps (massive layoffs and astronomical tuition increases) if these cuts go through.

Personal stake #2: My  son is a freshman at Northern Arizona University and I would not want to see Arizona dumbing down its education even further.

This is serious stuff folks.

Sidebar:

See how they have responded:

• University of Arizona - State needs to protect universities if aspiring to escape mediocrity

• Northern Arizona University – cuts “will delay economic recovery …for years to come“

• Arizona State University – How the cuts will hurt families and impact the state GDP

 

How fast should you update history?

OK, so the headline was a bit provocative. Maybe we don’t update history when we update a wiki. But in the case of the newly minted president of the US, changing his profile meant turning the page of history.

Not many people look at Wikipedia the way I sometimes do –at the Discussion pages –but on the night before the inauguration (Jan 19th) I learned some unusual things about how information gets written, edited, and in many cases fought over.

The Wikipedians managing Obama’s profile faced one nagging question –apart from the expected edit wars over how to describe his African-American heritage: At what point should the word ‘elect’ be dropped? At the oath, or at noon?

We saw how in other quarters, particularly on the White House web site (and blog) and the State Department’s blog, Dipnote, how timing was everything. On WhiteHouse.gov on Tuesday, a few seconds after noon, there was a message from Macon Philips the new media person behind the web site. He announced that ‘change has come’ to the official web site.

Back to Wikipedia, the question arose if a ‘bot’ ought to be assigned to do change Obama’s information, saying the official time he would assume presidency was 11.56 am. One said his photo was creepy and needed to be changed. While the debate raged, it was agreed that “If stuff starts to get out of hand requests for page protection” would be made.

Meanwhile, Wikipedians wait, fingers poised over keyboards, for Hillary Clinton to be approved by the Senate. As of this morning there’s the word ‘designate‘ after her Secretary of State title’ waiting to be scrubbed, among other things!

 

Will millions of cameras in Washington DC make surveillance easier?

When I wrote about Photosynth in June 2007, I wondered what it might do for crowd-sourcing mega events, even political ones.

That day has come.

Microsoft (which now owns Photosynth) has teamed up with CNN to enable all those snapping up the moment in history, to share those images, and more importantly knit them together as one composite.

It’s not just  the collaborative potential of this technology that’s mind-boggling. It gives new meaning to what we often refer to as the Big Picture, letting you look at a something in fine detail from multiple angles and distances, and in a thousand of different ways. You can zoom, tilt, look at a person or an object from its side, and often get a close-up view.

From a surveillance angle, this could be a great deterrent to anyone planning mischief. After all, any moment during the inauguration will easily be captured not by the surveillance cameras — there are some 5,000 in the area –but by the hoi polloi.

Take a look at this image of the Capitol (Sorry, but you’ll need to download a small application on your computer first to use Photosynth) and you’ll see what I mean. You could move in so close to the dome, and the windows below, you could spot the surveillance camera looking down at you!