Though O’Donnell laudably tried to concentrate the audience’s interest onand hopefully very last, Charlie Sheen trainwreck interview, courtesy of the tragic undertow that threatens to pull Sheen below for good, I used to be overtaken, not by the pulling around the thread, and the voracious audience he serves. It didn’t make me unhappy, it built me angry.
With regards to celebrities, we are able to be a heartless region, basking in their misfortunes like nude sunbathers at Schadenfreude Seashore. The impulse is understandable, to some diploma. It could be grating to listen to complaints from most people who take pleasure in privileges that the majority of us can not even picture. For those who cannot muster up some compassion for Charlie Sheen, who helps make a great deal more bucks for a day’s effort than the majority of us will make within a decade’s time, I guess I can not blame you.
Together with the rapid tempo of activities on the net and also the specifics revolution sparked through the World-wide-web, it’s especially painless for your technologies trade to presume it’s completely unique: regularly breaking new ground and accomplishing facts that no person has ever accomplished just before.
But you will find other sorts of enterprise which have by now undergone a few of the exact same radical shifts, and have just as wonderful a stake inside the foreseeable future.
Take healthcare, for example.
We generally suppose of it like a big, lumbering beast, but in fact, medicine has undergone a series of revolutions during the past 200 a long time which might be no less than equal to those we see in engineering and data.
Much less understandable, but however within the norms of human nature, is the impulse to rubberneck, to slow down and look at the carnage of Charlie spectacle of Sheen’s unraveling, but on the blithe interviewer Sheen’s everyday living as we pass it while in the suitable lane of our every day lives. To become truthful, it might be hard for folks to discern the variation involving a run-of-the-mill interest whore, and an honest-to-goodness, circling the drain tragedy-to-be. On its personal merits, a quote like “I Am On a Drug. It’s Labeled as Charlie Sheen” is sheer genius, and we cannot all be anticipated to get the total measure of someone’s life each individual time we hear anything humorous.
Quick forward to 2011 and I'm looking to examine means of currently being a bit more business-like about my hobbies (mostly audio). From the conclude of January I had manned up and started to advertise my weblogs. I had generated several completely different blogs, which have been contributed to by good friends and colleagues. I promoted these routines by Facebook and Twitter.
Second: the small abomination that the Gang of 5 about the Supream Court gave us a yr or so back (Citizens Inebriated) in fact comprises a little bouncing betty of its individual that could incredibly perfectly go off inside the faces of Govs Wanker, Sacitch, Krysty, and J.O. Daniels. Because this ruling prolonged the concept of “personhood” to both firms and unions, to experiment with to deny them any ideal to operate within the legal framework that they were organized underneath deprives these “persons” from the freedoms of speech, association and motion. Which implies (when yet again, quoting law college educated loved ones) that either the courts have to uphold these rights for the unions (as individual “persons” as guaranteed by the Federal (and most state) constitutions, or they've to declare that these attempts at stripping or limiting union rights should apply to main corporations, also.
Comcast Chief Executive Brian Roberts let investors in on a little secret Wednesday during his keynote speech at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media and Telecom conference in San Francisco.
The 51-year-old executive's biggest concern over the last year was nothow best to fold NBC Universal into Comcast. No, Roberts said, it was the transition to replace his No. 2 executive, Steve Burke, who had been in charge of the day-to-day operations of the company's lucrative cable business.
Last month, when Comcast took control of NBC Universal, Burke became chief executive of the television and movie company. Burke surrendered his role and title of chief operating officer of Comcast. Neil Smit -- who joined Comcast 13 months ago from cable company Charter Communications -- is now executive vice president in charge of all of Comcast's cable operations.
Roberts called the executive changes Comcast's "most important transition."
After all, Comcast's core business of cable TV, Internet and telephone service brings in $36 billion in annual revenue. Comcast's programming business, which now includes NBC Universal, generates a little more than half that amount.
Despite dramatic changes underway in the media business, Roberts remains bullish on the company's prospects. Comcast raised its dividend last month and plans to buy back $2 billion in stock. The Philadelphia-based company, Roberts said, took control of NBC Universal at a particularly advantageous time. The NBC Universal businesses are now doing better than when the deal was first announced in late 2009, and Comcast needed less money than it had anticipated -- $6.2 billion in cash versus $6.5 billion at the time of the announcement -- to pay General Electric Co., which now has a minority stake in NBC Universal.
The television advertising market has rebounded in the last year, and there's a new stream of revenue as cable companies begin to pay the broadcast networks for their programming.
Roberts said he expects NBC to help bolster Comcast's Golf Channel and Versus, a cable sports network. On the movie side, Comcast can use its clout to shorten the traditional period of time before movies become available on DVD and video-on-demand services, a benefit to Comcast customers. And soon, NBC Universal programming will be available, joining Turner channels, HBO, Starz and Showtime, on Comcast's anytime, everywhere TV service, Xfinity TV, which now has an application available for the iPad.
On Wednesday, Roberts suggested that the company's jewel is its broadband Internet service, which now has 17 million customers. That makes Comcast the largest Internet provider in the nation at a time when consumers are increasingly watching news and entertainment online.
"In the next 10 years, people will want more bits in their house than ever before," Roberts said, referring to Internet network capacity. And Comcast's investment in its high-speed networks should help it battle rivals that have cut into Comcast's customer base: satellite TV providers and telephone companies AT&T and Verizon, which now offer Internet and TV channels.
"We are focused on broadband," Roberts said. "The bet we are making is to be the best pipe. It's as simple as that."
-- Meg James
Photo: Brian Roberts. Credit: George Widman / Associated Press
In his New York Times column complaining about Huffington Post and the new economics of content competition, I think David Carr makes two understandable but fundamentally fallacious assumptions about news and media: that the value in journalism is in content and that making content must be work. Because that's the way it used to be.
In their op-ed the next day in the New York Times complaining about copyright losing its hardness, Scott Turow, Paul Aiken, and James Shapiro extend the error to entertainment, assuming that content is entertainment and content is what content makers make.
Not necessarily.
Pull back to view the true value of these things: information, knowledge, enlightenment, amusement, experience, engagement. Content can be and has been a vessel to deliver their worth. But it is not the only one. That is the lesson of the internet -- indeed, of Huffington Post itself. I have argued that the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, the BBC, and other media should have but never would have started the Huffington Post because they, like the gentlemen above, still see content as value in itself and further believe that content is their own franchise (granted by their control of the means of production and distribution). So the benefits of content cannot come from others -- bloggers, commenters, citizens, amateurs -- as new wine in new casks. They instead want to put their old wine in the new skins (witness The Daily).
That is why old media people are missing new opportunities. It's not about the content (stupid). It's about the value.
We can be informed now by many means: by our neighbors telling us what they know, enabled to do so by the net, at a marginal cost of zero, doing so not because it is work (and work must be paid) but because this is what neighbors do for each other. We can be entertained by many means: by clever people making songs and shows and telling stories because they love doing so and because they are compensated in attention rather than royalties (and that attention may well lead to money when they can finally detour around the gauntlet of old media's closed ways to find audiences on their own).
Why do people write on Huffington Post? Because they can. Because they give a shit. Because they like the attention and conversation. Because they couldn't before. Why do they sing their songs on YouTube? Same reasons.
Is there still a role for the journalist, the professional, the artist in this? Perhaps. I think so. That's why I am teaching journalism school. But I'm not necessarily teaching them to make content. That is now only one of many, many ways to meet the goals of adding value to information, time, and society. Some of my entrepreneurial journalism students are, for example, creating businesses that will use data to impart information; they will add value by gathering and analyzing it and making it possible for you to find the intersecting points that matter to you. Other of my students are creating platforms for you to get more value out of your own data. Others are creating platforms for people to connect around interests and make and find their own value. Others are finding new ways to sustain reporting and the making of content. They are all valid if they bring value.
If you concentrate on the value, not the form -- content -- then the possibilities explode.
Turow et al shut down the idea that opening up information can yield greater value that protecting it. Sharers are...
... abetted by a handful of law professors and other experts who have made careers of fashioning counterintuitive arguments holding that copyright impedes creativity and progress. Their theory is that if we severely weaken copyright protections, innovation will truly flourish. It's a seductive thought, but it ignores centuries of scientific and technological progress based on the principle that a creative person should have some assurance of being rewarded for his innovative work.
No, I'd say rather that there are more ways to open up value. If Wikipedia were copyrighted by a publisher, it never would have become Wikipedia because it would be owned, not shared. We now have a new means to collect value rather than merely to own content.
I remember at the DLD conference a few years ago when Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales defended himself from a ninja-knife-wielding Jason Calacanis over paying people to contribute to online resources. Calacanis, like Carr, called it work. Wales instead likened it to a pickup game of basketball. Viewed from a distance, basketball certainly looks like work; they sweat enough. So why don't we demand that they be paid? Why aren't we lamenting the loss of a marketplace for their value? Because that's not where the value is. It's in the fun.
Granted, what's done with that fun -- how it is exploited -- is relevant. If I start charging admission to watch you play basketball -- it is great content, after all -- or if I put sponsors' banners on the court -- you did draw an audience -- you might want a cut. If you can get it -- if you can show that there aren't a million competitors for court time in an open marketplace -- great! But what if the gate or the ads merely support my ability to provide free court time to you or free uniforms to your town-team kids? The economics are not necessarily sweat = work = product = pay. Neither is it any longer true that owning the expensive means of production and distribution assures a return on that investment. There are other expressions of value.
The truth is that Huffington Post recognizes the value of professionalism. I've lately recalled Arianna Huffington talking with Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger in London a few years ago when he -- with native irony, in front of his reporters -- asked why the hell she was hiring reporters, who are a pain in the ass to manage and expensive to boot. Because their stories get more traffic, she said. They add value. That's why she has editors and curators. They add value. That's why she has technologists who make the Huffington Post such a social experience. They enable value.
That's what I'm teaching my entrepreneurial students: add value. And be efficient: take advantage of the free exchange that is already happening -- the free and open platforms and the information that now easily passes on them. Then put your precious resources where you most add value. Do that before you even think of extracting value. There are the new economics of what we used to think of as content.
Source: http://removeripoffreports.net/ online reputation management
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