Successful Blog

  • Home
  • Community
  • About
  • Author Guidelines
  • Liz’s Book
  • Stay Tuned

Net Neutrality 5-24-2006

May 24, 2006 by Liz Leave a Comment

Net Neutrality Links

I’ve added these links to the Net Neutrality Page today.

Berners-Lee: Neutrality Preserves Net Openness

The computer scientist credited with inventing the World Wide Web strongly condemned moves by U.S. broadband providers to control their subscribers’ content, saying it threatens the Internet’s greatest strength: openness.

Tim Berners-Lee on Tuesday said some Internet regulation is needed but should be minimal. He said efforts to control content have far-reaching impacts on other areas for users, such as decisions on voting and development of democracy.

“I hope that the U.S. will come to the right decision, and there is a very strong groundswell of opinion for net neutrality,” Berners-Lee said. He spoke at the 15th International World Wide Web conference, an all-week meeting in Edinburgh, Scotland, exploring new Internet technology.

Dangerous dolts threaten our internet

When I started reading this story about an effort to use radio bandwidth to provide ubiquitous, cheap or free (ad-supported), broadband internet access across the country, I started to get happy. But then I saw the dolts who were proposing this and the dangerous things they doing and I want to make sure they don’t get anywhere near our internet.

SIVACRACY.NET

The American Library Association and the Association of Research Libraries have joined the SavetheInternet.com Coalition, which includes “groups from across the political spectrum that have banded together to save the First Amendment of the Internet: network neutrality.” The coalition has gathered more than 500,000 signatures in support of policies that would block network operators from charging companies for faster delivery of their content to consumers or favoring certain content over other content.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Related
NET NEUTRALITY PAGE

Filed Under: Business Life, SOB Business, Successful Blog, Trends Tagged With: 15th_International_World_Wide_Web_conference, American_Library_Association, Association_of_Research_Libraries, bc, BuzzMachine., Jeff_Jarvis, Net_Neutrality, SavetheInternet.com_Coalition, Tim_Berners-Lee

If He’s a Pulitzer Winner, Call Me a Citizen Journalist

April 22, 2006 by Liz Leave a Comment

Busted

In every Greek Tragedy, the protagonist has a tragic flaw that causes his downfall. I don’t see a protagonist here. I see someone who never outgrew schoolyard.

Last night the LA Times suspended a Pulitzer Prize winner’s blog for something he did that any 7-year-child knows isn’t right.

His name is Michael Hiltzik, and he lied by pretending to be someone else.

He’s a journalist, and he lied in print. He wrote comments under pseudonyms–nice ones on his own blog and not so nice ones on blogs that had content that disagreed with the content on his. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Business Life, Strategy/Analysis, Successful Blog, Trends Tagged With: bc, citizen_journalist, editor_and_publisher, Jared_Paul_Stern, Jeff_Jarvis, LA_Times, Mainstream_media, Michael_Hiltzik, New_York_Post, Pulitzer_Prize, Roger_L._Simon, Tom_Glocer, trevor_butterworth

Edelman Aces PR, NY Times Fails Research

March 12, 2006 by Liz Leave a Comment

Howie Kurtz writes about the nonflap the NY Times tried to stir up over Walmart and its PR company, Edelman, pitching their spin to bloggers

What’s not in dispute is that what was once dismissed as a pajama-clad brigade is becoming increasingly influential, to the point that giant companies have to worry about what they say.

Howie gives the bloggers the Times poked and prodded equal time to tell their stories (which includes the fact that the Times reporter doesn’t understand that a blockquote is our indication of taking an excerpt… except it’s not something we invented, it comes from academic practices).

—Jeff Jarvis of Buzz Machine, The flack flack

Wal-Mart Logo

Public Relations. It’s called public relations because that’s what it’s meant to do–establish relationships between companies and the public. Walmart needed some. They hired Edelman to help them tell their story by providing press releases. Edelman, as part of their effort, enlisted the help of bloggers to get the Walmart message out. Edelman belives in bloggers as a way of reaching people. In editorial, we call this creative thinking. Good firm, good strategy, good execution. Walmart and Edelman get an A in PR.

New York Times on the Web

At the New York Times, however, they didn’t think of it as PR or as creativity. They were looking for a story–with bloggers involved, maybe a scandal. Would it have been a scandal if the writers were small-town newpaper journalists? I don’t think so. You’ll notice The Times tells the story of one blogger weaving in bits about a second making a pile of details sound representative of a large group–but the size of the group isn’t defined. Then sweeping generalizations come. To quote from the article, Wal-Mart Enlists Bloggers in PR Campaign, written by Michael Barbaro,

But the strategy raises questions about what bloggers, who pride themselves on independence, should disclose to readers. Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest private employer, has been forthright with bloggers about the origins of its communications, and the company and its public relations firm, Edelman, say they do not compensate the bloggers.

But some bloggers have posted information from Wal-Mart, at times word for word, without revealing where it came from.

Some bloggers? How many is some? I wonder.

Some bloggers posted them without telling their audience was that a scandal, a mistake,or an innocent lack of knowledge on the part of someone who’s being called an amateur when it’s convenient, but not today?

As a number of people have pointed out, however, bloggers are far from the first people in media to do this. (Dan Gilmor has a good overview of the controversy.) People say all the time that Mainstream Media cover various corporations or government initiatives as if they were just reproducing press releases. What about the Video News Releases, stories planted in the Iraqi press, or a quarter million dollars for favorable coverage of No Child Left Behind?
says Marshall Kirkpatrick in his piece When pitched bloggers go bad: Walmart and the blogosphere

The question is one of knowing intent isn’t it? Knowing intent, in this case, should be considered both on the part of the blogger and on the part of the New York Times reporter–who failed to contact the numerous bloggers who had things to say such as this:

Yours truly is one of the people to which Mr. Barbaro is referring in this last paragraph. I have been “fed” some of these “exclusive nuggets” and have had topics suggested for posting. And though my blog was not mentioned in the Times article, I’d like make to make one thing clear: excluding this one, I have written 12 other posts on Wal-Mart in the last five months. I started writing them long before I knew about or heard from Wal-Mart’s PR firms.

Every one of those posts is original. That is to say, I picked the article, the theme, and everything that was written- every sentence and every word and every typo. I challenge Mr. Barbaro to find even one sentence in those 12 posts that was written first by someone else.

I also have a question or two. How is it that my blog escaped your notice? It is the number one blog in Technorati about Wal-Mart. It has a dozen highly original, detailed, and analytical posts on that firm, each of which averages over 700 words. It’s written by a former MIT professor whose dissertation and first published papers were about information technology in the retailing industry. I ask not out of concern for not having my blog included in the article but because of this: if you missed that, what else did you miss?
— David Starling, The Business of America Is Business

I have to say that the research on The New York Times article leaves a lot out there waiting to be brought forward. The story is much more fascinating than what actually made it into print–just as bloggers are.

Finally this from Rich Edelman’s own blog:

We are proud of our groundbreaking work in reaching out to blogs on behalf of our clients and proud of this work for Wal-Mart. I suspect our clients have benefited hugely from insights gleaned from dialogue with bloggers.
Here are three blog postings from people I know and respect discussing the issues raised in the NY Times article:
The first is from Paul Holmes, editor of the Holmes Report, a PR trade publication. The second is from Jeff Jarvis, a widely respected blogger considered a leader in blog standards. The third is from Dan Gillmor, author of “We The Media.” As always, I appreciate your views.

Update: Robert Scoble suggests blogging — not emailing — is the best way to reach bloggers.

THAT’S an example of someone who “GET’S IT.”

Blogger is starting to feel like it rhymes with “second-class” citizen.

Let’s hire Steve Rubel, a VP at Edelman, and ask him to do PR for bloggers as a group. Then the NY Times can write a piece called Bloggers Enlist Bloggers in PR Campaign.

I like the sound of that one much better.

But then I would.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Related articles:
Gate Keepers v Amateurs by Jeff Jarvis
Mr. Glocer Don’t Spin Stories to My Fiends

Filed Under: Personal Branding, Strategy/Analysis, Successful Blog, Trends Tagged With: bc, bloggers, David_Starling, Jeff_Jarvis, Marshall_Kirkpatrick, New_York_Times, Rich_Edelman, Stevel_Rubel, Walmart

Recently Updated Posts

6 Keys to Managing Your Remote Workforce

9 Reasons To Use WordPress

Useful Marketing Tools That Wont Bust Your Budget

Do You Have What It Takes To Be A Successful Blogger?

Do You Have What It Takes To Be A Successful Blogger?

6 Tips for the Serial Side Hustler

How to Make Your Blog Popular



From Liz Strauss & GeniusShared Press

  • What IS an SOB?!
  • SOB A-Z Directory
  • Letting Liz Be

© 2023 ME Strauss & GeniusShared