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Link: PolitickerNV is apparently in the business of ripping people off
PolitickerNV is doing a bad thing here. Anytime you aggregate content you have to be careful about how you do it. Should you include the full post, some percentage, a tiny bit, a headline, or what? The unwritten (and some written as copyright) rules would dictate that you post a little and link to the full. I’ve never appreciated when bloggers post entire news articles. It’s not yours to give away. Link to it and let the creator benefit from what he or she has done. The same should go for news outlets linking to bloggers. If you plan on running a site, especially if you’re making money from it, you had better not be using other people’s content to make that money without their permission. Period. PolitickerNV needs to stop running full posts, and probably needs to just stop ripping stuff off from people that haven’t contacted for permission.
Link: Is FriendFeed actually useful for something?
This is the best case yet that Scoble has made for the less-than-useful FriendFeed. I find it an annoying app that tries to take all the simplicity out of things like Twitter. Why do I need comments on Twitter? But this application of FriendFeed would make my daily scouring of the internets a whole lot easier.
Link: Charles Barkley: bad guy
This is tough to disagree with. Chuck was once entertaining, and can be if you watch NBA stuff on TV, but he’s just not a really good guy. Remember when he was going to run for governor of Alabama?
Link: Nevada New Media: right where? right when?
More people seem to have questions about Nevada New Media than are saying anything decent about it. This nails a point that’s been out there since the burst onto the scene a few weeks ago. The involvement of Tracy Viselli, a self-promoter over community participant, more or less sealed the deal for me. We’ve been talking about this for over a year, but this group wasn’t around to be a part of that. Too bad.
Link: Excellent iPhone Photography group on Flickr
The inimitable James Ball has started a group on Flickr for iPhone photographers. If you’ve got one, get in there. It should be fun seeing all the ways people use the iPhone’s camera to make sweet, sweet imagery.
Link: I have a whole slew of links I need to get out there
In times like this, I wish the Reactionary Hurl was still around. Instead, I’ll just post like this is it and move on.
- Massive Hoth Lego Diorama – How cool is this? Star Wars geeks all dreamed of making something like this at some point. This guy did. Sweet.
- On teaching old dogs new tricks – This is specifically about teaching social media to “the media” (see this post for more background), but it easily applies to anything where you have to explore new ways to compete and be good at what your organization does. Note that I didn’t say be good at what you do. Organizations have to adjust, and that means that individual members of the organization have to make incremental changes themselves. The punchline of this, of course, is that in the current economic state, justifying your position is always something you have to do, and without being able to teach the old dogs in charge what you’re doing, you get tossed aside.
- Cortez-Masto Audited – Lo and behold, the troubles that politicians can get in seems to know no party bounds. So what will happen here? According to the RN&R, which is hardly a Republican-friendly publication, Masto’s alleged misdeeds are part and parcel with Lt. Governor Brian Krolicki’s misdeeds that led to Masto seeking (and getting) an indictment on him. This goes way beyond politics, I think, at this point. We’re getting to the point where our pretty decent state, filled with pretty decent people, has grown to the point where we’re now ruining lives for what appears to be political gain. It’s sickening that it’s how some people have chosen to operate. No longer is trying to win a political battle on ideas enough in Nevada; we’re now indicting opponents as criminals and moving them out of our way from there. Neither of these two people (Cortez-Masto and Krolicki) are even close to the scumbag governor of Illinois, who is considered a scumbag by politicians in a state filled with scumbag politicians. What either one or both did might be illegal, but I think this, along with some of the charges leveled in the last gubernatorial election, marks the end of politics that are driven by a genuine desire to do good for Nevada. I think that’s sad, and the rest of us will be relegated to the ruled class instead of being a part of a state where any of us could conceivably present what we have to offer and get a chance to win election and try to implement those ideas. Call me naive, but that’s how I see it.
- Why Journalism Schools should not be teaching PR – I’ve been thinking about this very heavily the past week or so. It’s something that I have always thought was strange—that advertising and PR were in the same college as the craft that seemingly was at odds with them by nature. Bob Conrad lays the case out in ten points. I think you can go beyond what he says and hyper-focus it down to the idea that the main thing most people take away from journalism schools is the ability to write well. I think that’s less important today than it ever was, but that’s a post in itself. I guess I’ll start working on that one now.
Misc: New Media is not what you think it is
As just about all of the people who read this will know, I fashion myself somewhat knowledgeable on the idea of New Media. Whether that’s something you agree with or not is beside the point. The point is that I think it’s true, so I spend time thinking about it, discussing it, working in it, and trying to figure out what the answer to the grand question of it is.
The interest in this stuff was both enhanced and refined during my time in graduate school. The program I was in fashioned itself as a new media think tank, where we would attempt to come up with ideas that shifted the thinking in general on “the media” and build tools that helped shape news coverage...