Archive for April, 2007

So I spot this link to a video about a competitor in the recent North Pole Marathon and bike race who decided to skinny-dip in the Arctic Ocean (because, if you’re gonna do a marathon and ride in a bike race at the pole, you might as well swim, too, to get the full “triathlon” experience). And there’s something about global warming awareness behind the guy’s dip in the frigid water. OK, this I gotta see. …

Alas, Youtube — in a fit of zero tolerance about nudity, I guess — has zapped the video. “This video has been removed due to terms of use violation.”

Oh, good grief. This is like those zero-tolerance policies at some schools, where the 2nd-grader gets suspended for having a plastic knife in his Spongebob lunchbox.

Practice some common sense, Youtube/Google! This is not pornography. Are you editing what gets published so as not to offend the Taliban? Get a grip, already!

Administrators at Virginia Tech are getting questioned (rightfully) about the way they handled yesterday’s shootings. After the first shootings of two people early in the day, university law enforcement did not alert the campus community while police tried to piece together the situation. When the second and larger round of shootings occurred, most people on campus did not know about the earlier shootings — unless they heard about it via e-mails, phone calls or text messages from friends.

As is predictable in a big story like this, students and faculty on campus throughout yesterday’s tragedy used cell phones and the Internet to trade information and rumors. (Media Daily News has a good roundup story of this phenomenon.)

So, once again, the people who are part of the story use modern technology to get vital information from each other, while official institutions (campus police, university administration) fall back on the old way of doing things: Wait till all the information is gathered and analyzed before issuing a public statement.

Frankly, the world has changed. Just as news media must adapt to this demand for instant dissemination of what we know about a story, so too must other institutions. In hindsight, university officials should have shared what they knew almost immediately, so at least everyone on campus could have been hyper alert to potential danger.

The gatekeeping function in today’s wired (and wireless) world doesn’t make as much sense as it once did, when any eyewitness with a cell phone can be a reporter, and those involved have the means to share what they know immediately.

I love this: From a New York Times report on a new Pew survey, it is revealed that the people in the US that know the most about what’s going on (that is, the news junkies who actually follow what’s happening) are more likely to be viewers of fake news shows like Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show and The Colbert Report.

The people who knew the least: folks who watched network morning news programs, Fox News or local television news.

Ah, well that nicely confirms my stereotypes (especially of Fox News viewers). And I thought I was being just being prejudiced by my liberal, secular bias. (I’m a news junkie who does enjoy and watches Stewart and Colbert when I can find the time.) Guess not.

And here’s a juicy tidbit: 31 percent of people asked to name the current US vice president could not come up with Dick Cheney’s name! Incredible. Wow. You really have to be out to lunch to not have heard of the most unpopular and scary VP in American history.

Here’s an interesting excerpt from an ABCNews.com story about today’s horrific Virginia Tech shootings:

Many students were looking online for information about schoolmates. Some of them established a so-called “wall” at Facebook.com to share what they knew; others turned to MySpace.com.

“Many of us are all worried about our friends, so lets do this. If you are okay!,” wrote a person on Facebook who identified himself as Carlos “Mohawk Monday” Fernandez. “Please update your status in facebook to say something like ‘i’m okay.’”

The campus web system was quickly overwhelmed by e-mail traffic, and concerned online visitors, after news of the shootings broke. Students said they could not get on Virginia Tech’s site for information.

“I’ve talked with dozens of students today,” said Jeff Hancock, an Assistant Professor of Communications at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. He said, “Everyone is using … facebook. I’ve been using facebook to book guests … and VT students are using it to spread word quickly, account for friends and provide support for one another.”

While I’m not sure than any news organization serving Blacksburg, Virginia, or the surrounding area could possibly get enough traction to serve the need that Facebook is serving with this story involving a campus community, this does point out one of the major shortcomings of the websites of “old” media.

When traditional media doesn’t serve the needs of the community — in this case, for people involved in the story because they may have friends or family members at the school to learn the fate of those people — then people turn to services that do. In this case, Facebook.

There will be lessons to be learned from this major story.

I don’t always stand behind what I wrote several years ago. After all, writing about media trends and making predictions is dangerous business in an industry that changes as rapidly as online media. But I do still believe what I wrote in this column for Editor & Publisher Online, which is about American media’s (and American news consumers’) unreasonable squeamishness about seeing unpleasant realities.

The column re-entered my consciousness because E&P editor Greg Mitchell sent me a note today informing me that EditorandPublisher.com had republished it, on the occasion of the fourth anniversary of the fall of Saddam Hussein.

The intro to my rehashed column notes that despite written protect, few in the media have since adopted my point of view. The same problem that I cited in this column four years ago mostly continues. Most Americans still don’t see the true ghastly reality of the Iraq war and America’s involvement in it. They’re too “soft” to take it, mainstream news organizations seem to think.

I knew it would happen eventually, but it took a year.

Yesterday, a spammer created a user account on YourClimbing.com, then posted a blog item to the site (part of my Enthusiast Group network of sites) that was a lengthy “story” about some paycheck service. The spam showed on the site for only a few minutes before I spotted it, deleted it, then blocked the spammer’s account.

It’s not surprising that some spammer would try this. The surprise is that in our first year of operation, this hasn’t happened until now.

One of the things you hear critics of grassroots media (i.e., sites like ours that let users post whatever they want) is that there could be much abuse like that — and worse. And yes, it could still happen, and we’re ready to deal with it if the day comes. But my experience — and that of others plying this new form of media — is that it happens much less than you might expect.

I think this is partly a result of the narrow focus of our sites. YourClimbing.com, like our other sites, is so narrowly focused that it attracts only people who are passionate about the topic. That laser focus seems to keep abuses at a low level.

I just hope that yesterday’s spammer was an anomoly. He went to a lot of trouble (going through our site’s registration process, then posting) just to have his “story” online for 5 minutes.

Good grief! I see I haven’t posted to my blog since mid February. … Yes, I’ve been busy. But back to it, and maybe I can make the time between posts much less from here on. It sucks to be too busy to blog!

Anyway, as the project manager of Poynter’s Eyetrack III study, I’m of course interested in the latest Eyetrack, which was introduced recently. (I left Poynter a year ago and had nothing to do with the latest reseach.) Lots of folks have blogged about it, so I’m late to the party.

But one thing I was disappointed in was the use of headgear cameras for the online portion of the testing. Eyetrack IV covered and compared print reading habits AND online habits, which is pretty cool. When we did Eyetrack III, we focused exclusively on online reader behavior, and only referenced Eyetrack I, which was about print reading patterns and was more than a decade old.

In Eyetrack III, we used nifty new equipment that allowed eyetracking with no headgear. A camera at the bottom of the monitor watched and calibrated eye movements, so the testing was close to natural online reading. In Eyetrack IV, the researchers opted to have test subjects wear eyeglass cameras for both print and online reading. There’s no other option (that I’m aware of) for print eyetracking.

The Eyetrack IV team could have gone headgear-less for the online portion of testing, but project manager Sara Quinn of Poynter told me: “We used the same equipment so that we had an apples to apples comparison. The research group felt like that would make it easier to explain.”

No doubt that was a tough decision. Had I been involved in Eyetrack IV, I would have argued to use the no-headgear technology. I just think that wearing a funny contraption is so foreign to the normal online reading experience that it had to affect the results. Indeed, I wonder if it affects the print results. Probably. But, of course, there’s no other way.