Despite the fact that O’Donnell laudably experimented with to concentrate the audience’s awareness onand hopefully final, Charlie Sheen trainwreck interview, courtesy of the tragic undertow that threatens to pull Sheen beneath for excellent, I was overtaken, not from the pulling on the thread, and the voracious audience he serves. It didn’t make me depressing, it designed me angry.
Regarding celebrities, we will be a heartless nation, basking within their misfortunes like nude sunbathers at Schadenfreude Seaside. The impulse is understandable, to some diploma. It may be grating to listen to complaints from consumers who like privileges that many of us cannot even think about. For those who can’t muster up some compassion for Charlie Sheen, who can make more bucks for any day’s get the job done than many of us will make inside of a decade’s time, I guess I can’t blame you.
With all the rapid tempo of events on the net along with the material revolution sparked by the On-line, it is very simple and easy for that know-how industry to feel it’s exclusive: continuously breaking new ground and carrying out stuff that no one has ever before achieved before.
But there's other types of home business which have previously undergone some of the same radical shifts, and also have just as good a stake from the long term.
Take healthcare, as an example.
We often imagine of it being a large, lumbering beast, but in fact, medicine has undergone a sequence of revolutions while in the previous 200 years which can be at least equal to people we see in technological know-how and details.
Less understandable, but nonetheless in the norms of human nature, may be the impulse to rubberneck, to slow down and look at the carnage of Charlie spectacle of Sheen’s unraveling, but with the blithe interviewer Sheen’s everyday living as we pass it inside the appropriate lane of our every day lives. To be straightforward, it could be tough for most people to discern the variation between a run-of-the-mill consideration whore, and an honest-to-goodness, circling the drain tragedy-to-be. On its own merits, a quote like “I Am On a Drug. It’s Identified as Charlie Sheen” is sheer genius, and we can’t all be expected to take the full measure of someone’s lifestyle just about every time we hear one thing funny.
Quickly ahead to 2011 and I am attempting to investigate implies of getting a little more business-like about my hobbies (generally songs). From the conclude of January I had manned up and started off to promote my weblogs. I had designed plenty of various blogs, which have been contributed to by close friends and colleagues. I promoted these routines through Facebook and Twitter.
Second: the little abomination that the Gang of 5 around the Supream Court gave us a yr or so back (Citizens Inebriated) literally is made up of a tad bouncing betty of its personal that could really effectively go off during the faces of Govs Wanker, Sacitch, Krysty, and J.O. Daniels. Seeing that this ruling prolonged the principle of “personhood” to the two companies and unions, to try out to deny them any ideal to run within just the legal framework that they were organized beneath deprives these “persons” in the freedoms of speech, association and movement. Which implies (as soon as once again, quoting law school educated relatives) that both the courts must uphold these rights for the unions (as particular person “persons” as guaranteed from the Federal (and most state) constitutions, or they've to declare that these attempts at stripping or limiting union rights really have to utilize to big corporations, also.
Of all the smartphone makers whose names are not Apple, HTC is the most impressive. An upstart company from Taiwan, it has done a great job of building iconic hardware using commodity platforms. It has developed branding and messaging that’s edgy, cool and fun.
More importantly, it was the first company to embrace the idea of developing a user experience layer in order to differentiate itself from the commodity OS-based hardware devices that would flood the market. So, it came up with HTC Sense. A lot of credit for this unique sensibility should go to Horace Luke, HTC’s chief innovation officer, who has been the lightening rod behind the company’s design philosophy.
Perhaps that’s why I’m amazed he allowed HTC to release the abominations that are being called HTC’s Facebook phones. These are essentially nothing but regular HTC devices with a dedicated button for Facebook, which provides:
one-touch access to your friends and family. With a simple touch of the Facebook button, your network is immediately privy to the song you’re listening to, the new restaurant you’re checking out or interesting website you’ve stumbled upon.
These aren’t really Facebook phones, which are a whole different beast, and will be game changers when they come to market. If you want to know what a real Facebook Phone will look like – let’s just say it won’t be anything like HTC ChaCha or HTC Salsa. Kevin Tofel pointed out, “aside from the dedicated hardware button, many of the Facebook integrations are already available in widgets or natively in Android.” As I wrote earlier, a real Facebook phone will be a phone that embeds Facebook services in the very core of the phone and uses a Facebook user experience layer.
What these phones seem to be is a marketing gimmick cooked up by the marketing department at HTC and not the innovators. I can guarantee you Apple would never pull a cheesy move like this. Remember the long-forgotten days when Motorola introduced an iTunes phone? Well, we saw how that worked out.
This move by HTC reminds me of the late-90s, when the Internet mania was in full swing. Many companies were jostling for pole position and ended up paying a lot of money to PC makers to place their Internet access software or browser software on the desktop. Others went so far as to bake these Internet software/services into their devices via dedicated buttons. PC makers made those moves by sacrificing the needs of their primary customers and letting the greed get the better of them.
This time around, the situation is entirely different. Hardware makers are leveraging hot Internet brands to differentiate themselves and sell their increasingly commoditized hardware. By building a Facebook button, HTC is essentially trying to anoint Facebook as the social network of choice.
What happens if Facebook becomes less popular and something else pops up? Will HTC make a phone dedicated to that service? Will we soon see a Twitter button, an Angry Birds button, and a Bing button? Or all of them? Will HTC soon be selling hundreds of different models, each with dedicated button? If yes, how will they bring them to market?
The sad part is, now that HTC has gone ahead and done this, it’s almost a certainty that others are going to copy them and start rolling out phones with dedicated buttons. It won’t be good for the overall smartphone market.
The idea of dedicated buttons goes against the very design philosophy behind smartphone platforms. I believe smartphones are blank canvases meant to be hyper-personalized by average Joes and Janes, who download the apps they want and make the device fit their life. I am sorry, HTC; I don’t want you or anyone else making a choice for me via dedicated buttons.
App of the Day: TuneUp
If you’re like me, then you have a music library that’s ungainly and a tad unorganized. For some odd reason, many of the tunes you’ve gathered over the years have missing tags or cover art. Until recently, I had a tough time trying to clean it all up. Then I discovered TuneUp, which works on both Macs and PCs. It’s like sending your expensive shirts for French laundry, except for music. It fixes everything. The free version has advertising, while the premium service costs $29.95, with a yearly renewal fee of $19.95.
What to Read on the Web
- Data Center Knowledge: 2011 – Year of the SSD
- Dan Ramsden: The long tail’s value to the vital few
- Garr Reynolds: Before success comes the courage to fail
In his New York Times column complaining about Huffington Post and the new economics of content competition, I think David Carr makes two understandable but fundamentally fallacious assumptions about news and media: that the value in journalism is in content and that making content must be work. Because that's the way it used to be.
In their op-ed the next day in the New York Times complaining about copyright losing its hardness, Scott Turow, Paul Aiken, and James Shapiro extend the error to entertainment, assuming that content is entertainment and content is what content makers make.
Not necessarily.
Pull back to view the true value of these things: information, knowledge, enlightenment, amusement, experience, engagement. Content can be and has been a vessel to deliver their worth. But it is not the only one. That is the lesson of the internet -- indeed, of Huffington Post itself. I have argued that the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, the BBC, and other media should have but never would have started the Huffington Post because they, like the gentlemen above, still see content as value in itself and further believe that content is their own franchise (granted by their control of the means of production and distribution). So the benefits of content cannot come from others -- bloggers, commenters, citizens, amateurs -- as new wine in new casks. They instead want to put their old wine in the new skins (witness The Daily).
That is why old media people are missing new opportunities. It's not about the content (stupid). It's about the value.
We can be informed now by many means: by our neighbors telling us what they know, enabled to do so by the net, at a marginal cost of zero, doing so not because it is work (and work must be paid) but because this is what neighbors do for each other. We can be entertained by many means: by clever people making songs and shows and telling stories because they love doing so and because they are compensated in attention rather than royalties (and that attention may well lead to money when they can finally detour around the gauntlet of old media's closed ways to find audiences on their own).
Why do people write on Huffington Post? Because they can. Because they give a shit. Because they like the attention and conversation. Because they couldn't before. Why do they sing their songs on YouTube? Same reasons.
Is there still a role for the journalist, the professional, the artist in this? Perhaps. I think so. That's why I am teaching journalism school. But I'm not necessarily teaching them to make content. That is now only one of many, many ways to meet the goals of adding value to information, time, and society. Some of my entrepreneurial journalism students are, for example, creating businesses that will use data to impart information; they will add value by gathering and analyzing it and making it possible for you to find the intersecting points that matter to you. Other of my students are creating platforms for you to get more value out of your own data. Others are creating platforms for people to connect around interests and make and find their own value. Others are finding new ways to sustain reporting and the making of content. They are all valid if they bring value.
If you concentrate on the value, not the form -- content -- then the possibilities explode.
Turow et al shut down the idea that opening up information can yield greater value that protecting it. Sharers are...
... abetted by a handful of law professors and other experts who have made careers of fashioning counterintuitive arguments holding that copyright impedes creativity and progress. Their theory is that if we severely weaken copyright protections, innovation will truly flourish. It's a seductive thought, but it ignores centuries of scientific and technological progress based on the principle that a creative person should have some assurance of being rewarded for his innovative work.
No, I'd say rather that there are more ways to open up value. If Wikipedia were copyrighted by a publisher, it never would have become Wikipedia because it would be owned, not shared. We now have a new means to collect value rather than merely to own content.
I remember at the DLD conference a few years ago when Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales defended himself from a ninja-knife-wielding Jason Calacanis over paying people to contribute to online resources. Calacanis, like Carr, called it work. Wales instead likened it to a pickup game of basketball. Viewed from a distance, basketball certainly looks like work; they sweat enough. So why don't we demand that they be paid? Why aren't we lamenting the loss of a marketplace for their value? Because that's not where the value is. It's in the fun.
Granted, what's done with that fun -- how it is exploited -- is relevant. If I start charging admission to watch you play basketball -- it is great content, after all -- or if I put sponsors' banners on the court -- you did draw an audience -- you might want a cut. If you can get it -- if you can show that there aren't a million competitors for court time in an open marketplace -- great! But what if the gate or the ads merely support my ability to provide free court time to you or free uniforms to your town-team kids? The economics are not necessarily sweat = work = product = pay. Neither is it any longer true that owning the expensive means of production and distribution assures a return on that investment. There are other expressions of value.
The truth is that Huffington Post recognizes the value of professionalism. I've lately recalled Arianna Huffington talking with Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger in London a few years ago when he -- with native irony, in front of his reporters -- asked why the hell she was hiring reporters, who are a pain in the ass to manage and expensive to boot. Because their stories get more traffic, she said. They add value. That's why she has editors and curators. They add value. That's why she has technologists who make the Huffington Post such a social experience. They enable value.
That's what I'm teaching my entrepreneurial students: add value. And be efficient: take advantage of the free exchange that is already happening -- the free and open platforms and the information that now easily passes on them. Then put your precious resources where you most add value. Do that before you even think of extracting value. There are the new economics of what we used to think of as content.
Source: http://removeripoffreports.net/ corporate Reputation Management
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