From Mount Pleasant to Chicago

From Mount Pleasant to Chicago
Originally uploaded by jcalderoneIWC

The last week of my college career I recieved this picture from my brother; his view from his apartment. It made me realize how far I've come (and how long I've been here, haha) at Iowa Wesleyan College. I'm ready to grow up and become a productive member of society, but at the same time I'll obviously miss some things of college, with 8am class not being one of those.

From Mount Pleasant, I'll be seeing Chicago soon enough.

Youtube Video

Here is my youtube post. It is a video I made from my Razr phone my freshman year of college and uploaded it to youtube.

Facebook "Like"

Recently Facebook unrolled their new web-wide standard of sharing information. The "Like" feature is already implemented on 50,000 websites, in which the user clicks the "like" button and this page is automatically shared to the user's Facebook page.

I think this is an amazing use of social technology. Websites will be shared more and more through it, instead of just copying and pasting. It also brings in even MORE users to Facebook, thus gaining them a huge market share and chunk of change.

Final Project

In case anyone reads this and wants a preview of my presentation tomorrow, here's the link. This will also serve as my copy to Dr. Price so he can view it after my presentation tomorrow.

http://prezi.com/b11dryk54bku/comm-380-project/

Comm 380 Project on Prezi

Photostream

I couldn't figure out how to get my own photos into a gallery or others photos into a set, so I developed two smaller streams to be viewed as one.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jcalderoneiwc/sets/72157623904718316/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jcalderoneiwc/galleries/72157623900633512/

Iowa Wesleyan College Video News Release

With the school year winding down, Iowa Wesleyan College has started the application process for living spaces. This video news release showcases one of the options: Carol J. Nemitz Suites

Lost iPhone

For Apple, Lost iPhone Is a Big Deal

This article talks about the lost iPhone prototype and how it came to be. This article concerns PR and New Media because Apple is getting TONS of free PR from this fiasco. If someone was to lose a prototype 20 years ago, the only consequence would have been another loss... someone's job. Now because of social media and how quick every bit of information is processed and spread, within a few hours of a link being posted from Engadget the blogosphere went wild. It was trending on Twitter, Digg, Facebook and practically every social media site.

This is creating a huge buzz for Apple while also allowing them to see consumer reactions, all of the trending topics are public, and tweak their product to counteract the reactions.

Attendance

Usually my posts deal with social media and technology, as that is the subject of our class and that's what the assignment is. Being as a blog is also an area for personal opinion though, I've taken one other time to offer suggestions to faculty and staff at IWC about e-mail, and I'm taking this entry to do so again but on the area of attendance policies.

I'd like to mention that this isn't meant as an attack, nor is it focused at any one professor. I've been at this school for five years, and these are my observations on how professors can improve their courses and create a positive learning environment.

I understand the importance of an attendance policy to freshman/sophomore level classes; there's a perception from various media outlets that you don't need to go to class and can hire the smart indian kid to help you cram for finals, and you'll be okay. But why is it an attendance that gets them points? Showing students that just for sitting in a chair, they get X number of points and improve their grade. That's it. Just for sitting there. Participation at this school is severly lacking in all areas (How many students on a regular basis answer questions in class? How many students attend on-campus events? How many students participate in Student Government?) because it's been reinforced that if they just sit there without a voice, it's okay. No opinion, just a body in a seat.

Another problem with an attendance policy is that it's a professors last ditch effort to give a meaningless class a meaning. If I can miss a week straight from a class and still do good on your test, your class is meaningless. You shouldn't post the Power Points to the portal, you shouldn't e-mail out notes, and you shouldn't let me make up work I missed. This all takes away from the meaning of the class, without assigning a grade just for sitting in a chair.

If you required students to voice their opinion and participate in the class, regardless if it's a discussion based course or a math class, giving a grade to their participation makes your class a lot more worth while. And all students are not created equal. Do not create advantages to equalize the course between a student who missed the last three weeks because of too many nights at The Alleys and the student who shows up every day.

If your course is truly meaningful and you need to attend class to get a good grade, that's an attendence policy in itself.

Microblogs

Sun's back out in mount pleasant and the snows melted, but not quite frisbee weather yet

Lots of green on Iowa Wesleyan college campus today, happy st patricks day!

Iowa Wesleyan girls bball advance! Next game tomorrow!

Spring break week for Iowa Wesleyan! Basketball teams leave for nationals on Monday!

Bingo tonight in the Iowa Wesleyan Howe Center and girls basketball in the Ruble Arena tonight, lots goin on!

free pizza & bowling tonight at the iris lanes in mount pleasant for all iowa wesleyan students!

Just got an email for the semester's free pizza and bowling sponsored by Iowa Wesleyan at the Iris lanes, can't say no to free pizza!

seems like most of campus was rooting for the Saints last night! #IowaWesleyan

http://bit.ly/5X0OTS link to my blog for Iowa Wesleyan College Communications 380 class

Mount pleasant Rec Center offering $50 memberships for the full semester, pretty awesome deal!

Wow, awesome read! RT @careerealism 5 Parts to a Cover Letter (a.k.a. How to Write a Good One!) http://bit.ly/2dwcxw (via @IWCCareer)

Watching @THAPAC in mt pleasant at the alleys tonight, good show great crowd! http://yfrog.com/au6ufej

Press Release

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
April 7, 2010

Iowa Wesleyan College To Hold Cheerleading Tryouts

(Mount Pleasant, IA.) On April 5th, 2010, Iowa Wesleyan College (I.W.C.) will be holding tryouts for the cheerleaders for the 2010-2011 school year. The tryouts begin at 5:00pm and all students interested in trying out are welcome.

The 2009-2010 school year saw Amanda Fulton take charge and the cheerleadering program make a comeback. They cheered on the sidelines during the home football games and performed during select games. They were also visible at select men's and women's basketball games during the record setting season for both teams.

Returning cheerleader Jade McWhirter said, "Last year was a great rebuilding year for us and we plan on taking the momentum we gained from this past school year into next year. We're all really excited to see what new people will bring to our squad and start off next year on a good foot!"

Any student interested in trying out should contact Amanda Fulton for more information at: amanda.fulton@iwc.edu

Chat Roulette

A few months ago I was told about this website from a friend. The premise is very basic. You click start, enable your webcam, and you're connected to another user somewhere in the world also using this site. It's 100% anonymous and random, so there's a huuuuge variety of people you meet.

There's the classic perverts that are pretty naked, people wearing halloween masks, people having parties with chatroulette broadcasting, and sometimes you may even see a celebrity.

I think this a pretty great idea, as simple as it is. With everything, now all users need to figure out how to do is make money. Broadcasters could simply provide a running advertisement/movie poster and it would flash to every user who connects. Or maybe it would flash clips from unreleased movies, stimulating buzz from a group of random people privileged to have connected with that user.

Either way chatroulette is something interesting that everyone should try (remember though, it's 100% uncensored. Be careful and watch out for a large amount of naked dudes. Outside of that it's fun and goofy.)

Best of Youtube

The organization I chose for the "Best of Youtube" assignment is Google. They host a variety of videos on YouTube (conveniently they own YouTube) that assist users in getting the most out of their services. From Blogger templates, how to use search, and specifications on their upcoming cellphone, Google uses YouTube to it's fullest potential. Because they're so large and to my knowledge do not have a support center (maybe support forum, but there it wouldn't be official Google responses) they take a proactive approach, by showing us exactly what they offer and how to use the services.

Here is a few examples:

Tweet about Obama Assassination

http://www.dailyfinance.com/story/the-secret-service-is-investigating-a-conservative-bloggers-oba/19408303/

After the health care bill passed last night, a conservative blogger tweeted about an apparent assassination to Obama. The author also doesn't see his prior threats as very serious and sort of shrugged it all off.

This is pretty ridiculous to me. Any sort of threat to anyone for any reason should be thought of as serious. If I told you in person that someone should kill you, you'd be pretty freaked out and probably call some sort of authorities. When an anonymous person talking about the highest ranking official says something threatening, regardless of which medium it was expressed in, should be held accountable and looked into.

Authors and PR people need to realize their posts and tweets are all seen by the masses. They seek positive attention for a provocative and thought provoking post, but shun the negative attention there is going to be when they post something dumb and anarchic, such as in this case.

The Widget Company — Huisstijl design, briefpapier en visitekaartje

The Widget Company — Huisstijl design, briefpapier en visitekaartje
Originally uploaded by Third Eye Grafische communicatie

Here is now complete material with the logos and layout. This shows that they have extremely high quality work and a few of the possibilities if you choose them.

The Widget Company — Logo design, instructie

The Widget Company — Logo design, instructie
Originally uploaded by Third Eye Grafische communicatie

This photo now shows exactly the colors, elements, and layout of the logo for the client. This shows they're very helpful and open sourced to their client, allowing for them to keep a consistant color scheme throughout various marketing materials.

The Widget Company — Logo design

The Widget Company — Logo design
Originally uploaded by Third Eye Grafische communicatie

Here's the finished end logo that was sketched in the first post.

Third Eye Grafische - Use of Flickr

The Widget Company — Schetsen voor het nieuwe logo
Originally uploaded by Third Eye Grafische communicatie

This company specializes in logo and web design. They make a great use of flickr by using examples to show exactly the process they use for their clients.

This is excellent because anyone searching for a design company and searches on Flickr (although in another language) will probably come up with this photostream first.

It also takes away the element of surprise for any first time clients, as the process is shown from start to finish in a photo narrative of various projects.

How Iowa Wesleyan College could use Flickr

Iowa Wesleyan College already has a strong presence on Flickr. Just do a search on the popular website and over 500 photos are found. Some are scenic photos of our campus while others are imporant politians during visits to our school.

The problem comes in the fact that not too many people randomly decide to search for Iowa Wesleyan College on Flickr. The fact that theres many of these wonderful photos that we are apart of, but no one knows about, is making the photos practically worthless. Why wouldn't we promote the fact that John McCain visited and spoke to our school during one of the most important elections ever? We promote our Facebook and Twitter accounts but never once have I seen promotions to follow or search for us on Flickr.

There has to be some sort of widget or application which the school could add to the main website, which automatically updates new Flickr images with the search terms of Iowa Wesleyan. This would be a great promotional tool that allows all different points of view (obviously moderated) of our college.

Amazing New Presentation Tool

Hopefully not tooo many people in our class read my blog and steal my idea, because I'll probably be using this in my final presentation.

It's a flash based powerpoint alternative called "prezi" that is free (to a point) for students and educators to use. You can either use it online or a standalone on your computer, and it works with depth to shift from "slide" to "slide" instead of left/right up/down as power point does. You can also move in any direction, using paths to go from point a to point b, but the transitions are seemless and very smooth.

Here's an example of a Prezi that works very well with the program (although the subject matter might not be the most interesting) so you can get an idea.

TEDxBKK Speaker Package on Prezi

Copyright Violations

The most common form of copyright violations I see is in file sharing. Constantly people are asking me to put music onto their iPod, lend them a CD to rip/copy to their computer, and various other things. We discussed in class all of the ways that music sharing is illegal, even in the sense of playing a CD at a party without securing the rights. This seems pretty ridiculous to me, especially when the artists imply that money is not the motivation behind their copyright fiending.

Music is a form of art, hence why they are called "artists", and for artists in other mediums it's more of a struggle for them. They pride themselves in their form of file sharing with websites such as deviantart, flickr, and various others. They just put a simple watermark or some sort of signature so if someone was to use the image, it's automatically given credit. Music has something similar, with the id3 tag of the mp3 file, but rather than embrace that their music is getting out for free to many people who would never have heard the music, they become money hungry and began the lawsuits.

Another thing that is ridiculous about the legality of filesharing and license agreements is the double standard. This is expressed perfectly in this link, where the author discusses that when you purchase a CD you are purchasing a license agreement as well. So you cannot distribute the CD in anyway possible. This comes in outlets such as online, playing it at a party (as we discussed in class), etc. But when your CD becomes scratched and irreparable, the license agreement becomes irrelevant and you cannot obtain a free physical or digital copy, which would make sense upon purchasing such an agreement. (Please visit the link for a more indepth discussion).

When it comes down to it, the muscians who are worried about pirating are making the majority of their profits from touring, merchandise, and various contracts outside of music. The fact that they want to squeeze every penny out of consumers is ridiculous and they will never get my support for such a thing.

Social Media in Business Power Point

Social Media Uses By John Deere

View more presentations from jcalderone.

Video Referenced in Class

Just wanted to post the video which I mentioned in class on Tuesday.



Enjoy!

An Open Letter to the Faculty/Staff of Iowa Wesleyan College

Dear Faculty/Staff of IWC,

First, I'd like to let you know on behalf of all of the students at IWC that we appreciate everything you do for us. I know that it's not the pay or location that keeps you around here doing your job, but your love and passion for teaching or just helping in higher education and I'd like to thank you all for making our college experience here great.

That being said, I'd like to comment on the number of e-mails which you send out to the entire Iowa Wesleyan College student body. I understand many of you have very legitimate issues and events that must be communicated to students, but I ask that you PLEASE limit the amount of e-mails which are sent.

When I held the Student Government Association presidency, I had discussions with many professors about how often students check their IWC e-mail accounts, and why this number is typically very low. I always answered with the overload of new e-mails (about 5-12 on any given day), the subject is the main factor. Plain and simple: If the subject of the e-mail does not apply specifically to the student, they will not read the e-mail. Now if each student checked their e-mail once a day and had an 50% decrease in new e-mails from the IWCStudents list, this would allow for us to be able to give each e-mail the time to go through and read the body, regardless of who the subject is directed at.

My suggestion to the Faculty and Staff of Iowa Wesleyan College is to think about a few things:

Yes an e-mail is the easiest way to communicate with us, but is it the most effective? Be creative in your promotions (granted this doesn't apply to certain departments where important information needs to be cut and dry. I couldn't really see Ed Kropa "sidewalk chalking" about the last day to withdraw from a class). Like I said, we get a lot of e-mails. If you want us to take your class, come to your event, or find your glove (see below), try something else on top of e-mails.

Missing items shouldn't be e-mailed about. The campus lost and found is in Student Life (Colleen is a regular Sherlock Holmes it seems... at least for my keys), so if one finds an item it should be brought there. And if you're looking for an item, go there first. Simple? Yep.

I shouldn't get e-mails about a major or course which I'm not in. There is a section in the portal for professors to e-mail course specific users. If you don't know how to do it, I bet the I.T. department would be gladly to help out.

If you send out a lot of e-mails about smaller things, think about doing a weekly "newsletter" of sorts. That way instead of 5 e-mails during the week, just one on Monday gives you a better chance than seeing your name 15 times in my e-mail box. Odds are we'll delete all of them, even without looking at the subject.

Like I said, this e-mail isn't to attack you all and I hope it doesn't come off as that. This is my effort to help Iowa Wesleyan a better place for the students and the faculty/staff; We get less clutter in our e-mails, thus giving your e-mail a better chance of being read and having more time focused on it.


Again thanks for all of your continued time and effort put into making our college experience the best it can be!

Sincerly,


Joe Calderone
On behalf of the students of Iowa Wesleyan College

Interesting Slideshare Presentations

How to be a social media player

View more presentations from Tom McCracken.

Marketing Defined!

View more presentations from Jacqueline Teo.

"Eye"'ll be asking for this from Santa

This post doesn't have much to do with social media, but something that is pretty interesting and (to me) amazing.

Eye Controlled Earphones

The concept is since your eyes have an electrical potential, the headphones have tiny electrodes that picks up the change in electrical activity from which way your eyes move. Look left two times in succession to go back a track, and right two times in succession to skip a track, and so on for the other controls (looking clockwise/counter clockwise changes volume, etc).

This to me is extremely interesting, as technology is now beginning to morph into the body's natural movements and functions. What could be next? A blue tooth molar cap that lets you talk to people from your phone through it? A massager that dectects when your stressed and adapts instantly?

To me this use of technology is amazing. The slow adapters may see it as unneccesary or creepy, but think about what would our great grandparents would have said about Twitter, which the public is slowly but surely beginning to adapt to.

Blog Maverick Analysis

1. Blog Maverick

2a. The author is an individual, Mark Cuban. He is a famous personality for owning the Dallas Mavericks and a very successful entrepreneur

b. He does show his bias, but states that it is his bias for the most part. He also acknowledges when he can't discuss certain aspects (if he did in companies he's an investor in, he could have a legal problem).

c. It's a combination of both personal and professional. Cuban posts certain things dealing with his professional life, such as when he had charges brought to him by the S.C.C. for insider trading, but also with various aspects of his personal life and ideas that he has brought up. At one point, he offered a challenge to individuals with what he called "Open Source Bail Out" where he offered the best entrepreneurial ideas a grant to get the business off the ground.

3a. This blog is generally focused on the business world. Cuban tends to appeal to business men and people interested in forming a business, giving various ideas and tips to be more successful. He discusses a variety of topics in business and media, for example explaining many times what newspaper companies will have to do to regain ground over electronic media (still appealing to the business world).

b. The content is very informational, mainly with business and technology (Cuban is a key investor in an HD television network and other high tech areas) but is also pretty entertaining. He responds to many critics through his blog in a very smart way, but also shows his sense of humor. If you watch the NBA games where you see him, you can tell he's pretty outspoken and doesn't mind the fines from the NBA.

c. The content is updated about once a week, but is pretty sporadic without a specific updating regimen.

d. Cuban generally creates new content, unless replying to content.

4a. The blog has been around since 1999 (Link here)

b. Not much is revealed in a search through the archive. It's more of what exactly he's been doing now. Replying to critics and generating his own information and advice for entrepreneurs, hoping that his advice can work for everyone else too.

5a. Sites that appear in his blog roll are sites he either invests in or sites that are something he has created.

b. The community he tries to associate himself with is a community of success. All the links are to currently successful projects of his, whether or not he's the face of the companies/organizations.

c. Many different types of sites link to this. The majority is fans of the Dallas Mavericks using his blog for information on the Mavericks situation.

d. This site does not use trackbacks.

6a. Cuban does use comments to support two-way communication. In his open source bailout project, he actually only accepted submissions through comments. This allowed for others to gain advice and plans from other's plans and then modify to make them work for themself.

b. There are MANY comments on this blog. Cuban does not seem to respond to comments on his blog.
c. Yes, many of the same people do comment.

d. I can say that most people read this for either tips on how to become a better business person or curiosities about the Dallas Mavericks.

7a. The design is pretty straight up and almost boring. Other than the title at the top, there rest is text. I think it adds to the site because Cuban is a no-nonsense type of guy. The point of the blog is his words, not a flashy design.

b. Very easy, because there is only text. He uses the text for his blog and then few links on the right and that's about it.

c. I agree with it. He shouldn't want to impress people with the design, his ideas are the impressing part.

8a. I would rank it as a definite 5.

b. Cuban is a VERY successful man with millions of dollars. His advice can always be useful. He not only uses advice that he used to become successful, but almost thinks outloud on certain aspects, so you can almost gain a business idea from his blog. The entertainment value is pretty high, because you may see something on the news about Mark Cuban, and shortly after he'll respond in an almost personal sense for everyone to read. I hopefully one day will become successful in the business world, and who knows, maybe it'll be from a variety of things I gained from Mark Cuban.

The Power of Twitter

In Wes' case study last week, he discussed the way airlines use twitter to interact with consumers to address user's complaints and let consumers know what's going on. This past weekend though, Southwest was caught receiving some intense and very publicized complaints from a famous voice, via twitter.

Kevin Smith (writer, director, actor, etc.) of Mall Rats and Jay & Silent Bob fame, had purchased two tickets (a "customer of size" policy required him to do so) but upon standing by for an earlier flight he only had once seat. Southwest then told him after he had boarded the flight he would not be able to stay due to limited space and, well, him being larger.

He became irate and went to the fastest spreading media outlet: Twitter. Posting comments such as "Dear @SouthwestAir I know I'm fat, but was [the] captain […] really justified in throwing me off a flight for which I was already seated?" and various explicit tweets directly to the Southwest customer relations twitter page.

Twitter caved and apologized many times, to which Smith never accepted, nor did he accept their $100 voucher gift.

This shows how intense the pressure of the public is, and how you can gain the attention of many extremely quick with Twitter. Everyone has this on their phone, laptops, desktops at work, pretty much practically anything with an screen and a microchip supports Twitter, and now Southwest is suffering VERY bad P.R. with this situation. Kevin Smith's tactic was very effective and it doesn't seem Southwest is going to be able to get out of this situation without egg on their face.

I do believe this was done to the extreme, in after looking at Kevin Smith's twitter page he has posted nothing but aspects of this situation constantly (to a point of annoyance) and his true motives, a new movie coming out, may have shown through.

PRSA Ethics

In reading the PRSA website, they define many aspects of Public Relations and how one should conduct PR in a professional manor. I have taken a business ethics class and a general ethics class, and it seems that most of the things that they discuss are second nature to most people. What comes in trouble is when the public relations professionals take this for granted and manipulate their power in a negative manor. Especially looking at the ethics section on the page, you can see that the PRSA do not take ethics lightly. They want to be a reputable association that members can take pride in being a member, even allowing for people who have any confusion on the issue to confer with the Board of Ethics and Professional Standards.

This is hugely important, especially when all that the public sees is put out by the P.R. department similar to what my industry will (hopefully) see as a marketing executive. Marketing is very similar to public relations, while P.R. tends to be more hindsight. As a marketer, I need to have very strong ethics and not be there to mislead the consumer but inform and promote. Not only is it ethically wrong to deceive the consumer it's illegal and very very costly to do so.

What struck me as pretty interesting is how big of advocates for this profession the PRSA is. They post many various rebuttals to any media outlet that poses a discussion towards the profession, professionally and curteously informing the public into the truth. I did not know that anyone did this but I think that it's very good for an industry to be able to show how successful and beneficial their members are.

E-mail in the decline... still?

Email is Far From Dead

I recently read this article from MediaShift. Dorian Benkoil discusses on how constantly for the past five years, news outlets have claimed that media is slowly becoming outdated. Certain social media platforms are taking over, and society prefers the "more" instant version of IM that such outlets as Facebook and Myspace have implemented, or the instant service Twitter provides.

Dorian is very right in the sense that these alternatives are very competitive, but also correct in saying e-mail just seems to be a safer source. People tend to think of their e-mail password as a lot more sensative than their social media passwords, and the fact of attatchments and such that are directly from one's server to another (for the most part) gives users confidence.

The use of e-mail with Facebook, Twitter, LinkdIn, etc gives e-mail more value, as you can check your e-mail once and see all the notifications from each service. It serves as a very simple aggregator, using the platform's preference options to determine what exactly you're notified of.

E-mail is definitely not on the decline, as everyone's been saying for the past five years but is proven to be the most secure form of communication and allows for users to aggregate all of their notifications into a simple subject line on their inbox.

Show me your friends...

Show me your friends and I will tell you what type of person you are...

The above link is the article I chose. Dr. Sonja Utz presents information that shows us the easiest way to judge a person is not to look at their personal social media profile, but to look into the information that they do not have control over, such as: their friends information, the amount of friends they have, and other influences that affect perceived "social attractiveness".

I definitely agree with this article. Why would you try and get to know a person based upon a profile which (usually) can be edited and monitored by the user? With respect to public relations, users of social media understand this and manipulate their social media profiles (as the article discusses) to portray a certain image. Looking away from the "extraversion" of the user and into the "extraversion" of the users friends, to which the user does not have direct control over, easily says more about the user.

I personally censor certain pictures, posts, and other information on my social media profiles to allow a certain image portrayed to others. I assume that if I apply for a job somewhere and my employer sees a majority of users in my friend list with pictures of them doing other inappropriate things, it's an easy crack into the true "Joe Calderone" (...not that my friends are inappropriate in anyway!).

Awesome Lectures

Just randomly came across a video on Digg (awesome site that users vote the content onto the main page), which eventually led me to the TED lectures. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design, and focuses on prominent leaders in each industry.

"TED is a small nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. Since then its scope has become ever broader. Along with the annual TED Conference in Long Beach, California, and the TEDGlobal conference in Oxford UK, TED includes the award-winning TEDTalks video site, the Open Translation Program, the new TEDx community program, this year's TEDIndia Conference and the annual TED Prize."

There's countless really awesome videos on here and I wasted a few hours on this site already, but here's some of my favorite lectures I've come across so far:







I highly recommend browsing the site and watching lectures in areas you're interested in or what you find interesting, as these are very informative AND entertaining.

"Over Twittering"

The article I chose is from the OJR's parent company "Knight Digital Media Center", which was linked on the OJR website. It's titled "Don't 'over Twitter' and other social media tips for news organizations".

Steve Safran, a media strategist, breaks the article into four main points for news organizations trying to deal with using the micro-blogging site. Mainly the article discusses Twitter, but it also gives general advice for other ways to use social media outlets to a news organization's advantage.

This article is an essential read not only for news organization's but anyone who is in the business of communicating any information to any sort of audience. The tactics Safran describes can be used by any sort of business and be completely relevant.

I disagree somewhat about the "spheres of influence" with Twitter though. Although re-tweet brings a message from one user and expands the audience, the original user will only re-tweet a message they deem worthy. Basic information wouldn't be re-tweeted or expanded to others not following the original poster.

Something I strongly agree with is the "aggregate, aggregate, aggregate" statement that Sefron obviously emphasizes quite a bit. All of the social media tools out right now are extremely helpful and many people subscribe to more than one outlet, but to have to go in and check each page/program separately is quite obnoxious and downright inefficient. It is essential for news organizations, businesses, or anyone trying to communicate with the public to have a one-stop-shop for all of their information without having to separately log-in to a specific service. With push notifications on cellphones now, it makes it extremely easy to get the audience such information, without the audience putting an effort toward looking for the information.

The Uninformed Tweet

New York Times Blogger Mocks Michael C. Hall's Cap Without Knowing He Had Cancer

This article relates to exactly what we talked about in class on Tuesday. The NYT writer had tweeted during the Golden Globes about Dexter star's attire; more specifically a stocking cap hiding the cancer-caused balding. Obviously he had no idea of the cancer, but the lack of information has caused him to catch grief. As we stated about publishing information so quickly, he could have avoided this by not using twitter as a place to think outloud but a place for inquiry. He is a professional and in this instance, he exhibits a very unprofessional "publishing" of (mis)information.

Screen shot

Here's my iGoogle page, caught a little bit of my volume screen in there too... whoops.

"Blog Maverick"

Looking ahead at some of the assignments for class, I noticed that we have to subscribe to a blog and follow it for a while and then analyze it. I chose to subscribe to Mark Cuban's blog, something which I've read before and find perfect for this assignment. I've come to find I agree with much of his opinions and analysis; he doesn't cut any corners, is a savvy business man, and really doesn't care what people think about him. He measures his own success, why care what other people (who mostly are less successful) think about him? He IS a PR person's nightmare, as many people only know of him as the crazy owner of the Dallas Mavericks who often gets fined for his on court antics, and also uses practically EVERY outlet to express his views and opinions. I'd hate to try and contain this guy, but at the same time that's exactly what makes him interesting to me.

Next blog will be a reactive post to the "information overload" reading.