Technology and celebrities - Part 1 (the trivia quiz)

I recently heard that technology and celebrities are two of the top subjects for popular blogs. This made me curious to see what technology a celebrity likes and how the rich and/or famous use these tools.

Photo of Ashton and Demi by TechCrunch50-2008

I've already heard too much about Twitter, (e.g. Miley's last tweet and Ashton's millionth follower) so I excluded it but there were still a few surprises that I'd like to share. Just for fun see if you can match the following statements with the correct celebrity. (Match-ups and full details will be provided in tomorrow's post).

Here are the statements:

1. developed an iPhone app to sell for $1.99
2. gained control of 800 Internet domain names
3. using Skype is one of the greatest things this year
4. says Blackberry is a marriage-saver
5. the Amazon Kindle ... an environmentally friendly investment
6. staged a creative collaboration using Cisco Unified Meeting Place
7. co-founder of a web design and technology consultancy

Here are the celebrities:

a) Dilbert creator & food company honcho, Scott Adams

b) Comedic Magician-Illusionists, Penn & Teller

c) Singer-songwriter, Rob Thomas

d) Media maven and TV host, Oprah Winfrey

e) National Basketball Association forward, Chris Bosh

If you enjoy trivia games, give this a try and post a comment with your guesses. Hint: More than one celebrity can match some statements (you're smart people so I don't want it to be too easy). If you don't like quizzes, don't worry, you can read the full stories in tomorrow's post.

Old Media, New Media - Why Not Both?

Photo by Striatic

Opinions vary on whether new media is responsible for the challenges being faced by newspapers, television networks and other traditional media. These contrasting points of view show the extremes in the debate:

According to R. Scott Hill in his book, The Blog Ahead, blogging is "enabling a radical new form of egalitarian discourse" by allowing anyone to bypass the hierarchies of command and control. It sounds like a good thing for those of us who feel gatekeepers have too much power, right?

Andrew Keen doesn't agree as you can tell from the title of his book, The Cult of the Amateur, where he expands on "How blogs, My Space, You Tube and the rest of today's user-generated media are destroying our economy, our culture and our values".

We hear of newspapers seeking creditor protection, reducing staff and trying to survive falling revenues, but new media has similar challenges. It's not easy to turn online readership into revenue either. Perhaps the path to success depend on both worlds working together.

There are already a number of traditional and new media fusion examples:

• Some of today's best-selling books started their life as blogs. Once the blogger developed enough content and buzz for their subject a traditional book becomes a natural next step. If the blogging is about Julia and by Julie, it also becomes a movie.
• On the ellen daytime talk show they use Twitter to create a rewarding game that links a college campus with the live show. A recent one involved students receiving a Tweet to be one of the first group to bring a bar of soap to a central point to receive a prize. Then those winners were asked to do a specific stunt (dress up and act out a song title from a musical group) in order to win the super prize. This provided TV content, built the show's brand by increasing "followers" and advertised the prize sponsors.
• Newspapers have to go to print while some stories are still evolving. The National Post has a service that enables readers to get breaking news on their mobile devices using Scanlife software and 2D bar codes located near specific articles. This prompts their smartphone to display updated content related to the story which readers use to follow the latest developments.
• Of course the most obvious example of the successful fusion of traditional and digital media is Indigo-Chapters and Amazon. In addition to using the Internet for their catalogue and their sales channel, you can now even browse the contents of many books with their "look inside the book" feature (this is available for both the books mentioned above.

These examples show that both sides of this debate will win when good content and ease of access are wrapped in the most appropriate media. As always, the successful business models need to show creative use of the best options.

Cliches: Yesterday's News?

photo by: mpclemens

"I was so hungry I could eat a horse."

"He is fit as a fiddle."

"They are a few bad apples."

Did that hurt? Sorry.

Most people don't like cliches. They are the written equivalent of liver and onions. The Boston Globe's James Parker tries to argue that they aren't all bad. In his article "Let us now praise... the cliche", James fights for the cliche. He says that the cliche is "one neat little payload of meaning." Why take the time to go into detail and explain something when a cliche will send the message quickly and clearly?

A cliche is not such a horrible thing. Sure overuse can be quite painful, as 58-dan demonstrates in the comments, but they have their purpose. Using them allows you to connect with a wide audience.

Cliches are part of social culture and they seem to be a favourite tool of politicians. Democracy, as James points out, runs on cliche. They let politicians connect with the largest possible audience to get their message across.

It's a bit of a stretch to say that cliches make for great writing. But if the goal is to communicate a message then you shouldn't shy away from them. A good cliche will keep the writer and audience on the same page.

Info-junkies

How many times have you accessed the web in search of something in particular, and after 3 hours left your computer with a bunch of new interesting facts, but not what you actually were supposed to search for?

As human beings and web surfers we tend to let our curiosity guide us in the quest of gaining information, but this quest is frequently frustrated by the amount of knowledge that surrounds us.

Peggy Orenstein in Stop your search engines describes this kind of experience, and gives an extreme solution to the problem by inviting us to try Freedom, which disables networking on macs for up to eight hours at a time. After you've made up your mind to install it on your computer, it works like a A.A detox program making it almost impossible for you to go back online for the time you requested.

The program is having 4,000 downloads a month, which shows that many of us are becoming internet junkies, and need help to let go of the temptation to get back online. The days of constant visits to the library to investigate throughly the most mundane of subjects are long gone, and so is deep knowledge:

"Centuries after his death, brain studies show that true learning is largely an unconscious process. If we’re inundated with data, our brains’ synthesizing functions are overwhelmed by the effort to keep up. And the original purpose — deeper knowledge of a subject — is lost, as surely as the corpses surrounding Sirenum scopuli."

The thought that all the bits of information of multiple ideas we read every day, are preventing us from acquiring deep knowledge from specific ideas is alarming, and yet a fact for the generations that never knew a world without Internet.

NBC's World Blog

Some people may not think of NBC as a place to search for interesting, off-beat travel stories, but have you ever been to their World Blog?

In their own words…

NBC News World Blog aims to provide a dynamic look at world events and trends -- both big and small -- from NBC News correspondents, producers, and bureaus around the world. Online entries -- from text to video -- will explore news events and how they are shaping our world.

Regular contributors include NBC News correspondents, producers and staff based in bureaus across the world and on assignment.

It is – in a nutshell – human interest and travel writing by staff based abroad – in the places you might least expect to find these types of stories.

Like Adrienne Mong, an NBC News Producer currently based in Kabul, sharing stories about the local culture of kite flying and the little known grave in Kabul of famous British archeologist and Silk Route explorer Sir Marc Aurel Stein.

Warangkana Chomchuen is another NBC staffer based in Bangkok. One of his recent entries tells the tale of a boy born to migrant workers from Myanmar who travels to Japan to represent Thailand in the paper plane championships. He eventually wins and returns to Thailand and to a life in limbo – having no permanent status in Thailand and no other country to call home. Before that entry, Chomchuen talks of the fat traffic cops on the streets of Bangkok, being told – get in shape, or else!

The stories are wide-ranging, and unique. From the people reporting the big stories in far off places, the World Blog is perhaps more of a reflection of some of their personal interests – not something ready for the six o’clock NBC TV broadcast.

Technorati's State of the Blogosphere

This is something we'll take a bit of a look at either next class or the one after it, but it'll be of interest especially for those of you looking for a broad, statistics-heavy view of the internet: Technorati's State of the Blogosphere. It looks like this year's edition is happening right now, but past reports—like this one from 2006 and this one from 2007—provide a great overview of the web.

Some Banksy Street Art

This is a stencil done by British street artist Banksy, in L.A.

Photo by Lord Jim.

Banksy said:

I always wanted to save the world. Now I'm not sure I like it enough.