Only took me a couple days, but photos from the C-130 trip to Barrow (August 7, 2008) are now posted on Flickr. It’s amazing just how long it takes to select, title and caption 91 photos, but it’s done.
I won’t bother you with the blow-by-blow story here. The goodies, including explanations, are over on Flickr.
Okay, this isn’t new media, but it’s too cool to not mention…
Later today I’m hopping a Coast Guard C-130 in Anchorage and flying, pretty much all day, to Barrow, Alaska and back. As part of the flight we’ll also spend some time over the Arctic Ocean, surveying the tremendous retreat of the sea ice this year (last year was a record-setter).
The Coast Guard is doing some PR with Alaskan journalists to demonstrate how they’re getting situated up north to handle the added responsibility of patrolling Earth’s newest (navigable) ocean.
I’m not officially a journalist, but I work with them, I do some of their new media, I write their headlines and, well… they’re busy this week. Suckers!
There are probably about 15 journalists going on the 9-hour roundtrip flight. They come from all media — print, video, web and audio outlets are all represented.
I’ll be sure to share some photos and maybe a little video later.
Thanks to Lost Remote for sharing this one.
If there were a CNN mailbox in my neighborhood, I’d totally smash it, too.
http://www.thedailyshow.com/sitewide/video_player/view/default/swf.jhtml
Okay, this has nothing to do with public media, but it just caught me off-guard today. The NY Times reports Olympics officials in China are prepared to do gender testing on athletes to ensure females competing in female events are actually female.
Well, this was predicted several years ago by the short-lived (though still alive) animated series Futurama. Good news for the Olympics — they’re still around in the year 3000…
[flashvideo filename=video/BendHer.flv /]
Hat tip to Steve Elvington for this hilarious find from Current.tv.
http://current.com/e/88913552/en_US
Too bad they don’t mention Twitter, Pownce, AIM, GTalk, Skype, Tumblr and all the rest. Twitter alone is worth an entire episode.
Hat tip to Erno Hannink for the posting at the wonderful new media blog from Stowe Boyd: /Message.
Forgive me. I just had to share this.
Tech writer David Pogue has a great little piece up today explaining why using Web 2.0 (interactive) technologies and methods are important for any company. Public media is no different, of course, and if we are supposedly community-focused, then it means even more sense that we open the doors to the public. (It’s always surprised me how little the “public” appears in public media.)
He has a particularly funny example from an internal — yet open-to-the-public — disussion at Microsoft regarding whether the game Minesweeper should be included with Windows.
Bottom line?
Yes, you’ll have to moderate this stuff. Yes, it means spending money with no immediately visible return on investment. Yes, it’s more work for everyone.
But you’ll gain trust, goodwill and positive attention. You’ll put a human face on your company. And you’ll learn stuff about your customers that you wouldn’t have discovered any other way.
Funny how trust comes up first in his list of benefits. Sound familiar?
