Successful Blog

Chartreuse Has Picked His New Orleans Team

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Citizen Journalists after Katrina

You might recall that Chartreuse’s Prince Campbell put down his own money, which was added to by the Blogging Times, the Blogging Herald, and KnowMoreMedia, to send a film and interview team to New Orleans. The crew of three who will be going was announced today on a post on Chartreuse (BETA). The team of three includes:
Mishikea Brathwaite: From Los Angeles, Calf., Travis Campbell: A New Orleans native who now lives in San Francisco, California, and Loren Feldman: From New York, New York. They will be helped when they get there by New Orleans resident, Candice Quates, friend and reader of Succesful Blog.

As Prince said about the trip:

The three people will be meeting in New Orleans on Friday August 11.

There is a Thrifty rental car reserved for them at the Airport.

They will be staying at the Avenue Garden Hotel on St.Charles Ave. in the Garden District of the city. (One of the main reasons I chose it is because of Internet Access. High Speed is not available in some of the hotels I checked.)

Though they will be mostly on their own there are already interviews set up with people in a 150 mile range. These are people who supposedly have first hand knowledge of some of the atrocities mentioned in the email I received.(They will have to do some travelling but this isn’t a vacation.)

The point of this trip is to find out the truth. And to give us a first hand view of what’s happening in the city and the outlying areas.

We’ll be keeping an eye on their travels to hear the stories of what is happening to the real people living in the aftermath of Katrina. Bloggers have the power to make things happen in the most tangible fashion.

Never forget the power of blogging. We can make things happen.

ME “Liz” Strauss

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Net Neutrality 8-3-2006

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Net Neutrality Links

I’m adding these links to the Net Neutrality Page.

Stevens Scrambling for Anti-Net Neutrality Votes

Stevens is still trying to force a vote on his inaptly titled telco give-away bill, the Communications, Consumers’ Choice, and Broadband Deployment Act of 2006 (S. 2686). But he’s not having much luck so far. . . .

he article singles out Santorum, DeWine, and Chafee as resisting efforts to push the bill to the floor before the elections. Not only are they hearing from constituents on this issue, they are raking in some serious cash from moneyed interests on both sides of the debate. They really don’t want to have to vote on this before the election. . . .

AT&T’s Whitacre: ‘Nobody Gets a Free Ride’

“This thing is growing at a rate that nobody would imagine,” [AT&T CEO Ed] Whitacre said of the market demand for bandwidth. He said AT&T networks are now handling 5.6 Petabytes of data every day. “There’s more and more content, and you need more and more bandwidth, and somebody’s got to build it.”

“If you build it, you have to make a return on that,” he continued. “Nobody gets a free ride, that’s all.”

This kind of language, of course, leaves open the possibility that AT&T will (or already does) offer some of its customers a better ride across its access networks in exchange for fees. But it doesn’t necessarily mean the provider would block content that it disagreed with, which is a fear that most net neutrality backers discuss the most.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Related
NET NEUTRALITY PAGE

Digg This! A Post Born in OZ

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Open Mic Night Collaboration

Somewhere around comment 180 last night, the conversation turned to writing a post about bad customer service people. Titles for Doug’s idea were tossed around between quite a few commenters including Brian Clark, Chris Cree, and the Advice Librarian.

Today that post is a reality.

Why not go over to digg.com and digg it?

Who Else Wishes There Were No Moronic Idiots in Customer Service?

Go on. Support Doug, Open Mic Night, and living social media.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Here’s Doug’s original post at Service Untitled:
Who Else Wishes . . .

Net Neutrality 8-2-2006

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Net Neutrality Links

I’m adding this link to the Net Neutrality Page.

Telcos Keep Castigating the “Free-Riders”

GigaOm’s Katie Fehrenbacher attended today a speech by AT&T Chairman Ed Whitacre before the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners and reports that he’s as hard-line as ever about network neutrality. Here’s what he said:

“Some companies want us to be a big dumb pipe that gets bigger and bigger…No one gets a free ride. The American economy doesn’t work that way…We are not going to build this with no chance for a return. Those that want to use this will pay.”

Comcast, Cox, Time Warner to Start Mobile Voice Tests

The Hollywood Reporter’s Andrew Wallenstein has this extended, excellent piece on the cable-telco battle of the bundles. Buried in the article, however, is something new to me: Comcast, Time Warner and Cox will start this month testing the sale of mobile voice service as part of a new, expanded quadruple-play package.

This potentially killer combination flows from the $200 million dollar-backed consortium formed last year by Comcast, Time Warner, Cox Communications and Advance/Newhouse with Sprint-Nextel. According to the piece, Comcast and Cox will trial a mobile voice service in selected markets including Boston, Austin, Texas, and Portland, OR. . . .

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Related
NET NEUTRALITY PAGE

Happy Blogtipping August 1

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Three Really Great People

blogtipping icon 1

Each of these folks brings a special humanity to the blogosphere you can see that in the energy and insight of every word that they write. So today being Blogtipping Day, August 1, I tip my blog to them.

Here’s how it works.

  • Choose three or more bloggers you admire and link to them,
  • List three reasons why you admire each one.
  • Then add a tip at the end.

That’s all there is to it.

1. Ann at Manage to Change. I tip my blog to you because

  • You blog about ideas that people need to think about, yet you do it with heart and humanity that gives them depth and appeal.
  • You care about the community and leave your blog to seek it out. Then you share the ideas with your readers in wonderful ways.
  • You are one of the most supportive commenters I’ve read in the blogosphere. You’re specific and insightful, and you say what you mean.

    • My blog tip: Consider writing a post on Liz’s Blog :).

    2. Tammy at Marketing Basics

  • You have great way of incorporating what you read into dynamite blog posts.
  • Your writing voice is warm, delightful, and filled with energy.
  • Your comments always call me to action. They deserve a thoughtful response because you have taken the time to think about what you read and to thoughtfully comment.

    • My blog tip: Your comments are the best promotion for your blog. Use them often and liberally at new blogs every week.

    3. Robert at Accidental Taorist

  • Your twist on things is unique and special. Your thoughts and your humor are your brand.
  • You write better than you give yourself credit for or than you believe. Push the envelope a little and have fun with it.
  • You understand how to make a reader feel that there’s a real person behind the screen. I often feel like you live inside my computer.

    • My blog tip: I love your template, but I’d love it better if it worked in IE. 🙂

    –Me “Liz” Strauss

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    Net Neutrality 8-1-2006

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    Net Neutrality Links

    I’m adding this link to the Net Neutrality Page.

    More networked journalism: All for one, one for all

    Imagine this from the vision of Tom Evslin: What if all our Skype widgets had a button that allowed us to test and report the speed at which our Skype voice packets were being allowed through by our ISPs. What if then — following the 1 percent rule — just 400,000 of Skype’s 40-million-plus regular users hit that button and reported in how Skype’s — and other applications’ packets — were treated by their ISPs.

    This would produce an incredible data base showing whether ISPs are, indeed, discriminating against certain packets and applications to advantage their own. I suspect Cablevision of playing wack-a-mole with my Skype because it works fine on slower lines elsewhere but horribly when I try to do interviews with the Guardian or the BBC (which prefer Skype) from home. But I have absolutely no way of knowing whether this is true. . . .

    Now a reporter could take that data and go to ISPs to find out their side and get a good story out of this that has a big impact — one way or the other — on the net neutrality debate. Is there a smoking gun of discrimination to favor ISPs own packets? Or not? Let’s find out and report it.

    Now, of course, there is also a sort of Heisenberg principle (using the bastardized definition of it) at work here: When the reporter calls, the ISP may say, ‘Oh, this is a mistake. We don’t discriminate.’ And whatever was switched on gets switched off. Or this could happen simply when the ISPs notice that they are being watched by the magic button. So the act of reporting affects the news reported (but then, it often does).

    Now a journalist might say that this ruins the story. But the essential role of reporting remains in force: Journalism is a watchdog and now companies know that their customers are their watchdogs. Every customer is now a reporter.

    –ME “Liz” Strauss

    Related
    NET NEUTRALITY PAGE