Hack the debate?

Perhaps you've read Dan Gillmor's account of the comeuppance of "poor Joe Nacchio," a financial guy who happened to be speaking at an executive conference in 2002 when bloggers first flexed their muscles.

As Gillmor tells it in the introduction to his book, We the Media (available online), he and a couple other bloggers were live-blogging the event, commenting on Nacchio's speech. When Gillmor and another blogger started pointing out some discrepancies between what Nacchio was saying and what he had done, they noticed the audience started getting hostile. Turns out that a lot of them were following the blogs while listening to Nacchio's speech, and they didn't like what they were reading.

We could see something similar take place via microblogging during this Friday's presidential debate (or town hall session, if McCain pulls a no-show).

Current TV and Twitter are planning to run real-time twitter messages ("tweets") over Current TV's live broadcast of the debate. So instead of just listening, viewers can comment on what's being said and see what others are saying...in close to real time.


The Current TV website notes that it will broadcast "as many of your debate tweets as possible right over Obama & McCain, in real time, on our live broadcast."

If you want to take part, all you need is a Twitter account and an internet connection. Then just tweet to your heart's content...and add "#current" to your tweets so they'll be queued for broadcast. You can also follow these tweets by searching #current on Twitter search.

Check it out at: http://current.com/topics/88834922_hack_the_debate

The change we need

To hell with the same old "drill, drill, drill" -- it's time for some good old American innovation.




Wanna help? http://www.wecansolveit.org/content/pages/371/

Going to the dogs

Ever wonder what kind of dog you'd be...if you were a dog, that is? Well, now you can find out. Just go to the Dog Trivia page of the Dog Show USA web site, and you too can find out what kind of dog you'd be.

The trivia page also includes a "who owns who" quiz to determine what kind of dog owner you are, and a dog trivia quiz (I failed...miserably).

What a good way to direct traffic to a site! And what a good promotional tool for the site sponsor, Purina.

(What kind of dog would I be, you ask? A Golden Retriever. And in case you're wondering, no, I don't have a dog, though we did have a Golden Retriever as the family pet when I was a kid.)

Direct link: http://www.dogshowusa.com/trivia.php

Are you "Sicko" yet?

I just sent this letter (without the graphics) to both of my senators:

Yesterday I went to see Michael Moore's film, Sicko. I left the theater wondering why -- if America is the smartest, richest, most innovative and powerful nation in the world -- we can't figure out how to provide good health care to all Americans.

If the Canadians, the British and the French can do it (to say nothing of the Cubans), why can't we?

For example, did you know that in Great Britain, doctors get bonuses based on the improved health of people in their care? If their patients stop smoking, lower their blood pressure, etc., they get a bonus. In the United States, doctors get bonuses for seeing the most patients per day, for not making referrals, and for denying requests for treatment. Our insurance companies reward doctors and other employees for denying coverage and courses of treatment -- for limiting costs, not for helping people. We've got it entirely backwards.

It is clear that our national priority has been to make health care profitable for PPOs, HMOs, insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies, not to care for people. This has to change. We need to put people first, not corporate profits. We need to make health care a national right, not a profit center.

I think it's time to refocus the health care debate...away from incremental and useless changes like requiring people to buy insurance (so are they supposed to stop eating to pay for coverage?), or funding some coverage for poor children (at least until those funds run out -- tonight I watched NOW's Insuring the Children on PBS; it talked about how the State Children's Health Insurance Program is running out of funds and what that means to children can't get covered...like the Georgia girl who is likely to die without her diabetes meds).

Frankly, health insurance is not the answer. It is no guarantee of health care, not when insurance companies focus on making profits by denying claims and coverage.

One of my friends, a woman in her 50s who recently changed careers, is deeply worried about losing her job. Loss of income is bad enough, but the thing that really keeps her awake at night is the fear of losing her health insurance. She's got a health problem and she's worried that it will become a "pre-existing condition" and she'll won't be able to afford to get treated. And if she can't get treated, she won't be able to work.

In other developed countries, people can focus on doing their jobs, living their lives and caring for their families. They don't have to worry about being bankrupted by an illness or injury. They don't have to worry about dying because some bureaucrat denied them coverage or a needed treatment.

I want what other developed countries have. I want the security of knowing that if I get sick or am injured, it won't bankrupt my family. I want to know that if I get a serious injury or illness, I won't be allowed to die so some insurance executive can get a bonus. I want to know that, should I be unfortunate enough to end up with Alzheimer's like my mother, my family won't go have to through hell and destitute themselves trying to care for me.

National polls now show that health care is a top concern of a majority of Americans. That's because even those of us who have insurance know we are just one job and one claim away from denial of treatment or loss of coverage.

Please, it's time to change the debate on health care. It's time to make health care a basic right, not another privatized profit-making venture. Please do something.

If you want to do something, you can start by writing your representatives a letter too. Feel free to recycle parts of mine, if you like. And go see Sicko. See through the propaganda we've been fed all our lives, and see how the other half of the developed world lives.

Killing with kindness, musing on memes

I almost skipped it.

I was skimming the Books Update email from the NYT Sunday Book Review when I noticed a review of The Edge of Evolution by Michael J. Behe. His name sounded familiar, but I couldn't quite place it.

The promo blurb said, "In his second book, Michael Behe turns to genetics to poke holes in Darwin’s theory." That's when I noticed the reviewer: evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins.

Oh my, I thought, this is gonna be good.

It was. It's one of the kindest but most totally decimating reviews I've ever read. You can read it here.

____________________

One thing I hadn't realized is that Dawkins is the guy who coined the term "meme" to describe (as noted in his Wikipedia entry) "how Darwinian principles might be extended to explain the spread of ideas and cultural phenomena."

One of the most thought-provoking books I've ever read is Thought Contagion, a book about memes and the transmission of ideas by Aaron Lynch. I read it at about the same time I read another influential book, The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell.

Both Lynch and Gladwell consider how ideas, beliefs and even new products or fads are spread through society. That is, they try to explain why some ideas, beliefs or products catch on and become popular, while others -- that seem equally viable -- simply don't.

In Thought Contagion, Lynch identifies several "propagation advantages," which is how he describes the characteristics that tend to encourage people to pass on or "propagate" a specific idea or belief. In The Tipping Point, Gladwell looks at the factors that make ideas or products "sticky" and more likely to catch on with the public.

Both of these books could be helpful to folks in the advertising, marketing and P.R. professions -- to anyone who's in the business of persuading others, for that matter -- as well as to journalists and others who need to better understand the factors that shape society and debates on public issues.

It's a bird, it's a plane....it's a video game!

I read about this video game in the Multimedia Shooter blog and had to give it a try.

In Superman Returns, you get to play the part of Jimmy Olsen, the Daily Planet's star photographer, who's trying to get a shot of Superman for the morning edition. How fast are your reflexes?

I got a 48 on my first try...and an admonition that I could "do better." Can you beat me?

Blogger rhernandez points out that games like this are a good way to bring traffic to a newspaper web site...or your website or blog, for that matter...especially if tied to a timely event or story.

Is podcasting the new marketing?

A Tennessee writer friend of mine, frustrated in his efforts to get an agent or publisher interested in a novel he’d written with SciFi overtones, once described his plight as “no room at the genre.” If you were an unpublished author, he said, and your book didn’t fit neatly into an existing genre, you were probably out of luck.

That was 10 or 12 years ago, and it hasn’t gotten any easier. In fact, with the loss of so many independent bookstores and the continuing consolidation of publishing houses, if anything it’s gotten harder to get a first book published.

So determined writers are having to change tactics and find other paths to publication. My friend now publishes his stories online at his website, Tall Tales to Go. Here's a link to one of his tales, Can Aliens Be Angels? Or the Search for Armaggedon in Ol' Man Kelsey's Woods, a science fiction novelette.

Other writers are turning to podcasting to get their stories in front of an audience…and to attract the interest of a publisher.

An article in the Sunday Book Review section of the New York Times, Authors Find Their Voice, and Audience, in Podcasts, focuses on one such author, San Franciscan Scott Sigler, who writes “science-fiction horror novels.” The article notes:

After being snubbed by publishers for years, Mr. Sigler began recording his first book, EarthCore, in 2005. He offered it as a podcast in 22 episodes (roughly 45 minutes each) that he posted online and sent free to subscribers for downloading. Before long, Mr. Sigler had 5,000 listeners; by the time he finished releasing his second novel, Ancestor, last January, he had 30,000, as he does for The Rookie, which is playing now.

“A lot of no-name authors like me are getting massive grass-roots exposure, and some of us are going to percolate to the top and get on the best-seller list,” said Sigler, who now has a publisher and an agent.

Here’s the link to the prologue to Sigler’s first novel, Earthcore, which he recorded in a walk-in closet that serves as his podcasting center. You’ll note that it includes background music and sound effects, characteristics that distinguish it and many other podcast novels from audio books.

One web site now offering books as podcasts is Podiobooks.com. It now lists about 100 titles, including many science fiction and fantasy.

(Cross-posted on Jour 163 class blog.)

Viral marketing

I was browsing through the latest San Jose area meet-ups list when I found one for the SF Advertising 2.0 meet-up next Tuesday.

The topic of the meeting will be viral marketing, and the group's meet-up page has links to some fun examples. Here are my favorites: Monk-e-mail and Waitin' Woes. Oh, and the Mentos video contest winners site.

So much fun stuff, so little time.