Enter World: exploring mediated cultures

Saturday, June 02, 2007

More corporate changes

MySpace is deleting sex offender accounts too, 7000 so far, but even when MySpace makes an error it isn’t admitting it. Interestingly, there does not seem to be a backlash. One of the banned users is actually so desperate to have a MySpace account that he’s tried lying about who he is to create a new one and settled on borrowing his girlfriend’s account to access the site.

There are so many other options out there. My first assumption is that his dependency on the service must be due to lack of exploration/understanding of the web. Sure MySpace is a place to find music, people, etc but you can find MySpace pages through search engines in the same way you could find a Virb.com page (which not only also has music, videos, photos, and blogs but also LOOKS NICE and FUNCTIONS), facebook (which I hear looks nicer than MySpace and functions better), or even a personal web site that is not dependent upon conglomerate media dictating whether you are allowed access.

My MySpace response [update: account closed]—which includes the quote below:

In 1976, Pastor Martin Niemöller wrote:

When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.

When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.

When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.

When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.

Friday, June 01, 2007

brief list of current corporate screw ups re online communities

It seems online communities bought out by companies are messing up severely these days. I would chalk it up to the companies operating them not really understanding the existing community and having different sensibilities. That doesn’t mean they can’t learn, on the contrary they seem willing to learn albeit only after mistakes.

• LiveJournal deletes accounts in an attempt to rid the site of child pornography but goes way overboard and lands in the news.
• The flickr debacle where the person who had photographs stolen for commercial use and was posting about it had the post deleted by Flickr, which later apologized.
• And, though there is no sign of learning here, the JPG Mag take over that led to a member response of account deletions. This is truly a shame, because the approach to publishing is brilliant.

Corporate screw ups are probably to be expected, though still disheartening. Community action against it is not only a positive side, but perhaps needed to iron out the way corporations interact with the communities that grew up around social networking tools before the tools were purchased.

Thursday, August 17, 2006

tech support

connecting a mac to two networks

after days of not being able to have my iMac connected to both a wireless internet connection and my local router with the printer and hard drive the answer has finally come to me, and so I share with the online world ...

the brilliant tech that I spoke to last (in a line of three) pointed me to Network Port Configurations in system preferences > network > show. simply drag airport above built-in ethernet. voila. all works well in the land of computers.

Sunday, June 18, 2006

The Empire tries to be cool

the Empire is putting out The Hooligan in place of the arts & entertainment section that used to run on Thursdays called This Week. They claim it’s so they have something interesting for the 18-35 crowd and draw in new readers. But here’s a tip for you—the only time I ever bought the Empire was on Thursdays for the This Week section. A key to why they’re really changing it is in the linked article above—NO ADVERTISEMENTS.

But let’s play dumb and pretend that Morris Communications really cares about people in Juneau, and more specifically the dwindling “young” crowd that this city keeps trying to attract to town or at least keep in town ...

Why not ask us what we want? We might start with something like more interesting topics and better writing.

Tell us what’s happening outside of Juneau as well as in, but not with the AP Wire because we can read that in an RSS feed before your paper can be printed and distributed.
Tell us both sides to a story, not just the easy one. So there’s a huge debate going on in the political world of Alaska about gas and oil and pipelines—how does this tie to the rest of the world? How does this tie to alternate fuel sources and what does that mean for Alaska? Listening only to the legislators is like getting all your news from corporate press releases.

For local flavor, tell us what young people in town are doing, tell us about the businesses they start and the concerts they organize and why. Tell us why they all work more than one job, why they stay in Juneau anyway, what they’re doing to change the place.

Hell, get really daring and tell us how much we rely on specific cruise lines for our income and how we often bend to their will. Oh wait, if you did that we’d lose all our funding ... can’t have that. Bend baby, bend.

I mean, the Empire is cute and all with it’s Police & Fire section noting the garbage bears, but there’s no meat. And sure, we certainly need something in this town telling us the art happenings, but that’s only coming out once a week. We need real news every day.

Wednesday, June 14, 2006

Guerilla Marketing—an oxymoron?

Forbes is suggesting the use of ”guerilla marketing” for small businesses. There are a few things about it that seem off. First of all they claim hiring guerilla marketing professionals (an oxymoron in itself?) can cost up to 8% instead of the standard 4% allocated to maketing. Secondly, they say that the concept of guerilla marketing is getting to really know your clients rather than plastering large scale “old-media” with blanket advertisements. And thirdly, the Top Ten Techniques are oddly standardized.

When I think of guerilla marketing I think of graffiti, plastering walls and bulletin boards with fliers, and in general using low-cost options to get information out. This is contrary to everything Forbes is advocating. There is nothing daring or alternative about their top ten list (send out cards to top clients off season, give out information in newsletters or speeches, answer questions through your website...). Ok, I’ll give them the littering of library books with business cards as something a little daring for business—but wouldn’t it be better to run off a really cool bookmark and place that in books instead? But for the most part all of the suggestions seem to be marketing—nothing new about it.

Sunday, March 05, 2006

outrageous slackers

I hear a lot of complaints about how the Bush administration jumped from illegal wiretapping to uncovering the leak simply to cover its own precarious placement ... The underlying, and more important, problem here is the pacification of the mass media.

In an imitation of the administration, the media launched a campaign against Cheney and the White House following Cheney shooting his hunting buddy because the administration had not told them.

The Bush administration had not called the media to alert them to a faux pas. And this is surprising...why?

Since when is it expected for politicians to alert the media to their wrong-doings? And since when has anyone believed they could expect such an act from an administration that seals presidential archives, restricts Freedom of Information act requests, and hides anything it can (from meeting notes to prisoners) from the public?

The ruckus about Cheney not issuing a press release is either a way for the press to mask the fact that there is no longer any sort of investigative journalism present at the major news corporations or a glaring admission of exactly that.

When the media relies on press releases to uncover the news, is there really anything newsworthy about what is being reported?

My respect goes out to the local reporter at the Corpus Christi Caller-Times in Texas who followed a tip to uncover the story. That’s reporting.