The Savannah Business Report & Journal spammed me with their daily newsletter yesterday, which contained this little gem...
Ideas and IPs: Unconference Proves Real Success
By Burton Sauls
Special to the TBR...
One organizer, Burton Sauls, said that the expert leaders in specific sessions are considered "conversation starters" rather than presenters. "No trade show sales pitches, no PowerPoint's allowed," said Sauls, of the 10 one-hour conversations. "We had two sessions created on the spot as a result of interest in drilling down further on "How to Start a Blog for Business" and "Social Media Tools. We were ready and had extra rooms available for the impromptu sessions."
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Conversations were led by local experts on such diverse topics as "Podcasting and New Media" by Phil Sellers of http://www.citytrex.com
...
Advice to businesses or individuals promoting themselves, their products, their clients products: Don't say you won't do or allow something (like a product pitch) ... then turn around and do that very thing a couple paragraphs later.
Advice to media establishments trying to figure out how to participate in the world of blogs and the 24 hour news cycle: You still have to use editors. Printing press releases, especially where the author quotes himself and promotes a service he's associated with without disclosing it doesn't come across as good journalism.
Big Media And User Comments: The Onion Nails It
User feedback on blogs (or any Internet forum/community) is always fascinating to watch. Things start off great, but as the community gets larger basic human rules for interaction break down and, basically, everything goes to hell. The Onion, as usual, has a very funny look at how big media might interact with user feedback in the video above. The uselessness of trying to respond intelligently to the most outrageous comments is dead on and extremely funny.
Also check out the College Humor video that shows what a comment stream might look like in the form of an office meeting. Anyone who runs a blog will appreciate both of these.
[Pilfered entirely from TechCrunch]
What do you get for your $46,050 per year tuition to Duke University? Apparently not any classes on public speaking.
I cringed through a longer than necessary interview on NPR with Ryan McCartney, editor of the Duke University student newspaper, on the way home from work yesterday. He was commenting on Duke student's reactions to the announcment that the remaining three accussed Duke lacrosse players had been exonerated.
Every other word was "like", "y'know", "kinda", "sorta" or "um". And "um" isn't even a word, fer christsakes. Y'know is on the borderline, in my book.
Dude, you're on the radio. Think before you speak.
I just had an interesting story relayed to me.
Apparently some woman drove up to the truck dock at the back of the building, and in plain sight of several employees, proceeded to take what I'm told was a horrendous dump next to the tire of the semi trailer parked there. She then got back in her truck, and drove away.
So much more personal than an email.
