EchoDitto - Media

Campaign media could be so much more exciting - posted by Nicco

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 06:56:46 -0700

Between my work on NewsJunk and PDF last week, I’ve been mulling over the state of political campaigning and technology. On the Dean campaign, the campaign’s blog – Blog For America – was a critical communications implement. We built a big daily readership and we thought of it like our own cable channel or major newspaper. There was an explicit understanding that it was our media outlet, and that Matt Gross, Zephyr Teachout, and Joe Rospars (among others) were our “reporters on the ground”, covering the campaign – inside the headquarters and out on the road.

Dean desperately needed alternative sources of media. When I joined the campaign, every single news story about the presidential primary started something like: “John Kerry, Dick Gephardt, Joe Leiberman and five other presidential candidates…” Dean never got any press of any kind. But Trippi noticed that the blogs were writing about Dean. There was even an unofficial Dean campaign blog. Now here was a way to get ink, even if it was the virtual, blog kind of ink! Trippi started by posting on the unofficial Dean campaign blog as the campaign manager. And then there was an explicit decision: if the mainstream press isn’t going to write about us, then we’ll cover our campaign ourselves. Our rallying cry became: To the blogs!

Recognizing the power of new media to build our own work-around the “gatekeepers” of the modern political process gave the Dean campaign critical fuel, and the energy of the entire blogosphere was gasoline on the fire of Dean’s growing grassroots momentum. I’ve long thought that the secret sauce of the Dean campaign were the monthly in-person Meetups that Michael Silberman managed, but watching this election unfold I’m realizing that our blog’s end-run around traditional media (with the help of the rest of the blogosphere) was equally important.

All of which leaves me mystified why the campaigns haven’t built their own media operations. And I don’t mean just blogs. Why not a 24-hour newsroom, with anchors and field correspondents and commentators? The technologies needed – and even the distribution – are not expensive any more. You can buy a lot of consecutive time on cable with the kind of budgets we’re seeing this election cycle. Presidential campaigns of either party could attract top talent to create and manage the content. Not to mention the grassroots power of utilizing your supporters to create content.

Feeding NewsJunk over the last few weeks has made me recognize some of the gaps in media coverage – and the opportunities the campaigns are missing. There remains a mysterious and much revered relationship between the political campaigns and the political press corps, but I’m unconvinced that it serves the people well. And in all honesty, I’ve been disappointed by most of the blog coverage and commentary of the election; that’s why on NewsJunk you see mostly mainstream news sources. The blogs seems to mostly repeat items from the mainstream press – not just the news, but the commentary as well.

And it’s not just political news, commentary, and policy debates. Have you ever listened to Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell sportscast one of the Eagles’ football games? It’s fun. Give Al Gore a show on how to go green. Who would host “Deal or No Deal” on Obama’s network?

The great challenge of creating a news organization – or if it’s going to be broader than news, let’s call it a media organization – the great challenge is honesty. Campaigns are famous for spin and obscuring the hard questions. Even on our Dean campaign blog, it was hard to find an accurate and serious accounting for our loss in Iowa the morning after. But the radical transparency and honesty of your own media outlet would say volumes about the kind of President you might make, and the opportunities to set the agenda seem enormous.

I noticed that Linda Douglass, a major television journalist for ABC News, joined the Obama campaign as senior staff. [Full disclosure: EchoDitto does unrelated tech work for Linda’s husband, John Phillips.] It’s time to kill the 30-second spot and instead focus on the exciting opportunities and possibilities of the next generation of Fireside Chats. It’ll be fun. I promise.

Do Journalists Care About Blogs? - posted by Gisele Toueg

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 14:04:56 -0700

During the course of my time at EchoDitto, I've been asked by many clients about whether traditional journalists and reporters actually care about blogs and other forms of new media like podcasts and Facebook. The question has been very hard to answer, mainly because there hasn't been a ton of research on the subject, seeing as how it's so new. So many of our answers are anecdotal, citing a changing newsroom where the line between online and offline journalists is increasingly blurred, and the jump in traffic we see when websites are linked to from the Drudge Report, compared to a mention in a major metropolitan newspaper.

That's why we were thrilled to see a new study published by our friends at Brodeur last month. The study asked reporters to rank blog and social media news sites by beat: travel, technology, politics, health care, and lifestyle. The results are not terribly surprising, but they are incredibly useful, as they represent one of the first attempts to quantify the role of new media in traditional journalism. Some highlights include:

Over half of all reporters from all beats said social media and blogs are having a positive influence on the editorial direction of reporting.
4 in 5 reporters indicate a positive influence of social media and blogs on the diversity of reporting
Over two-thirds of political reporters (77%) and half of lifestyle reporters (53%) felt that social media had a negative impact on the tone of coverage in their area.
Over two-thirds (67%) of lifestyle reporters said that social media was having a negative impact on the accuracy of reporting in their area.

The study also lists the top blogs and online news sites in each category, with TMZ, Huffington Post, Engadget, TripAdvisor and NIH leading the lifestyle, political, technology, travel and health categories respectively.

To see the entire study, visit:
http://brodeurmediasurvey.com

As a side note, I also loved that they used the flickr slideshow widget to display the data from the survey, although the slides are a little small to fully appreciate in the widget. I recommend viewing them on flickr directly.

Where do you get your news? - posted by Meaghan Lamarre

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 13:20:04 -0700

There's been a lot of talk lately about the demise of the traditional print newspaper, sparked by Eric Alterman's article in the New Yorker called "Out of Print". It's an interesting discussion that made me examine my own news-procuring habits.

Sorry, print newspapers, but for me you're already dead. I most recently touched newsprint this weekend while I was balling up pages of the Washington Post to help get my campfire started. Before that, I can't even remember. I know that there are many of you out there who can't live without your morning paper (or papers), but that ain't me.

In fact, I get most of my news these days from Twitter. On the one hand, I get updates from official news outlets by following the NPR News Blog guys, the New York Times and CNN. On the other hand, and often more usefully, I get links to news articles of interest from the people I am following. I know I'm not unique in this - Steve Gillmor admitted to the same thing on a recent edition of This Week in Tech.

I used to read the Express, the daily tabloid produced by the Washington Post and distributed at metro stations here in D.C. But since getting my hands on an iPhone, I don't even pick that paper up anymore.

I shouldn't leave out radio here -- I listen to NPR religiously every morning as I get ready for work. And since we're chronicling my news media consumption, I also pick up bits and pieces from the TV in our office that's always tuned to one news network or another.

I know I'm not unique. There's plenty of data out there about declining newspaper readership, especially among young people. And we know that people are increasingly relying on blogs for their news.

But what about you - where do you get your news? Twitter, Facebook or email? TV or radio? Or do you love the smell of newsprint in the morning? Please share in the comments!

SXSW Take Aways - posted by Chris Jones

Mon, 17 Mar 2008 10:42:23 -0700

South by Southwest was an absolute blast. I could go on and on about the panels I attended or the people I met, but I'll just say they were all awesome. Instead this will be about what I saw as the overarching themes of the conference: accessibility and data ownership/transferability.

Big Point #1: Everyone is online. We're all aware of this, but too few of us produce work that is accessible to anyone besides english readers in standard web browsers. What about assistive technologies? What about non-english readers? How will we deal with localizing our work? There are some great projects to help with the creation and maintenance of content in multiple languages. More and more, we're going to have to make use of these things.

First, it's important to nail down the key terms. Internationalization does not equal translation. Internationalization, according to User Experience Designer Jon Wiley from Google, refers to the overall design of a product. That means getting down to architectural considerations, like whether or not the visual presentation of a site is flexible enough to allow for changes in character set height and width or direction that appear with localization of the actual content. According to him, English has relatively short words, which can expand greatly when translated. As a rule of thumb, he says that any layout should allow a +40% size tolerance to account for that expansion.

Beyond those architectural decisions, content must be localized. Wiley describes localization as the act of making content appropriate for a target audience. This goes beyond translating words according to culture to color considerations. For example, what does red mean to a target audience? It might mean urgency, or it might imply luck.

Google is available in 117 languages, and gracefully shifts from left to right text (ex: english) to right to left text (ex: hebrew). Google's visual layout is also fairly simple compared to a lot of our work. Luckily, they've produced some useful tools. CSS Janus does a fairly decent job of translating left to right-focused CSS to right to left. Google Translate is useful to check the fitness of a visual design for proper expansion for other languages (NOT as a translation service, of course).

So to summarize, everyone's online, and content needs to be accessible to more people. Localization is no small task. Following accessibility guidelines is not easy. So this point, machine translation projects cannot produce worthwhile text, so budgets will have to expand to work with translators. Still, it's crucial to get the full breadth of the audience on board with whatever it is a site is promoting, so it sounds necessary to me. Honestly, I'm excited about this stuff. I'm in the process of a full redesign of the website of a community bike shop I work with, which will be localized for both english and spanish-speaking audiences.

Big Point #2: We want control of our data. Again, we're all aware of this. Down in Austin, I felt a genuine air of paranoia about who owns data, and how protected and portable it is, and how we sort through it all. We've all dumped loads about ourselves on the web, and clearly business has an interest in using it to target marketing.

Users need choices and clear explanation about what is public and what is not. I'm probably not alone in being unsure as to which parts of a Facebook profile are public and which aren't. Things need to be simple and easy. Catering to the lowest common denominator is not always preferable, but with everyone using data harvesting services, maybe it's necessary. I can't imagine it's a bad thing that everyone knows exactly how Netflix works. They bop you over the head on every page as to what ratings do and how they produce better recommendations, so even my parents know how it works. That sort of transparency is good.

What about who owns the data? Facebook's culture is to just dump everything about yourself. Zuckerberg (Facebook's CEO) says that he's in this to change the way we communicate, and says relatively little about how that information will be used. Seemed like Beacon wasn't widely loved. What about our loved services? Flickr rules, right? Well, it's already owned by a fairly large company, which may soon be owned by an even larger and not always loved company. What about services like Twitter that exist with no revenue and tons of users. We love Twitter, but I don't understand how any company could exist with no revenue forever. How will these sorts of services use that information? Again, I love you, Twitter. This is not an attack, just a question.

How do we access all this stuff? There was a great panel that focused on OpenID and oAuth. Creating a new profile for every site we visit seems a little silly. Decentralized single sign on sounds great to me, but it's crucial that we trust those third party authentication services. I'm hoping to do more with OpenID in my projects at Echoditto.

In closing, the big points are things we've been aware of and thought about for a while now. The difference is that it's clear the rest of the web is thinking about these things too. We're in for some interesting times. Drupalers, time to look at the internationalization handbook. Maybe it's time to read about RDF, as it might blow our data concerns wide open. There's some neat stuff coming down the pike.

My "social web" epiphany - posted by Meaghan Lamarre

Fri, 14 Dec 2007 15:45:53 -0800

I have a confession to make.

For the past year or so, I have been merely "going through the motions" of using the newest social networking technologies.

True, I have been dutifully maintaining (ok, "maintaining" may be too generous) my MySpace and Facebook profiles. I signed up with Twitter and I've even twittered more than 20 times (granted, that's over the course of two months; I've already been chided for my lame tweets). I use the EchoDitto del.icio.us feed, and even started a personal one. One thing I'm on top of: I'm a dedicated updater of my Gmail status messages.

But the usefulness of all of this just hadn't clicked for me. Until today.

There was no earth-shattering revelation, no life-changing lesson inspired by a friend's Facebook update. Rather, it was a slow dawning of realization, built up over several month's use of these tools, of they way they facilitate what I can only describe as "shared being."

It reminds me of living on campus in college. When living in a dorm, usually in close enough proximity that you can shout and be heard by several friends, there is a constant exchange of ideas. Sometimes these ideas are of little value, but sometimes they're really clever, or creative, or brilliant. And the fact that you can bounce those ideas off your friends in your dorm, or in the dining hall, allows the ideas to grow into something really great. I really loved that about being in college -- the constant flow of ideas. And the feeling that we're sharing it all with one another -- the boring, inconsequential stuff as well as the epiphanies.

That's the feeling I get with these new social tools. Thanks to these technologies that allow me (and my friends) to broadcast our thoughts to the universe -- in a way that's so quick and easy that it takes almost no more effort than talking -- I can stay in touch with what the people important to me are thinking and doing, whenever they choose to share it. I learn an enormous amount from a friend of mine who twitters about the various web projects she's exploring. I get great ideas (and much amusement) from my friends who include cool links in their Gmail status messages. I'm smarter for having read friends' and coworkers' del.icio.us feeds. It's as though we're all sitting around the dining hall table, sharing whatever's on our minds. And it's really cool.

So, ok, I'm converted. I've got to go twitter this now.

President Clinton, Martha Stewart, and our newborn: MyCommitment.org - posted by Michael Silberman

Tue, 02 Oct 2007 08:22:38 -0700

Quick! Got a TV near you? Our latest project, MyCommitment.org, is going to be on TV today! Oh, and President Bill Clinton will be introducing it. Along with Martha Stewart. On her TV show. For almost a full hour. I'm not kidding, and, as you can imagine, it's making all of us a bit giddy.

MyCommitment.org launched this morning in conjunction with the Clinton Global Initiative annual meeting in New York City. The idea is simple: Global leaders, CEOs, organizations, and heads of state all come together each year to make massive commitments to help solve the world's greatest problems. But rather than letting the big whigs have all the fun, MyCommitment.org invites everyday citizens to participate in the pledging process with their own ways to make the world a better place. And just like at the CGI summit, every commitment that an individual makes must be specific, relevant, and trackable.

Find out when The Martha Stewart Show airs in your area today so that you can watch President Clinton explain the MyCommitment.org project along with his new book, Giving: How Each of Us Can Change the World. (We also had the honor of developing and launching the website for Giving earlier this month. Check it out here.)

It's not every day that global institutions—especially ones as influential as the Clinton Foundation—decide that the potential benefits of multiplying the reach and impact of their work far outweighs any risks associated with opening their doors to everyday citizens. Given the levels of true participation that MyCommitment.org is inviting and enabling, we see this project as a pretty bold move for President Clinton, his foundation, and CGI -- and we couldn't have had a greater privilege than to work on developing and implementing this campaign with the President's team.

Let us know what you think! (That is, of course, after you make your own commitment and rate some of the others.) Like almost everything on the web these days, this is only the first phase, so please drop a comment here or on the campaign blog with any ideas you have for the next evolution.

And if you think that both the MyCommitment.org and Giving sites are looking especially good, you can pay a compliment to our good designer friends over at BiroCreative; they're responsible for making it all look so slick, and I'm sure they'd love to know what you think as well.

UPDATE: Watch President Clinton announce the launch of MyCommitment.org at the CGI meeting:

EchoDitto featured in AP story on last night’s CNN YouTube debates - posted by Madeleine Perry

Thu, 26 Jul 2007 12:23:31 -0700

Many of us were up late last night watching the CNN YouTube debates, excited at the prospect of a different debate format. Finally, the voters, people like you and me, had the chance to ask a question directly to a potential presidential candidate.

While most of us were watching the debates, quietly judging the merit of each question and wondering what would come next, AP was calling our colleague Michael Silberman to ask his opinion on the effectiveness of the debates:

"The greatest innovation of this debate is that we're seeing candidates respond to real voters instead of polished TV personalities," said Michael … "It's a win for the candidates who are at their best when addressing voters. It's a win for democracy, since average Americans outside of the early primary states now have the opportunity to ask direct questions of candidates."

To read more, click here, here, or here!

No Citizen Journalism, Please. We're French - posted by Terrance Heath

Mon, 12 Mar 2007 07:45:31 -0700

Imagine this. You're standing, waiting for a bus when you hear a commotion; screaming, yelling, gunshots, etc. You turn around and witness someone being dragged in to a van-- kicking and screaming -- by several armed, hooded individuals.

Instead of diving for cover, you whip out your mobile phone and start capturing video at the precise moment one kidnapper shoots a security guard and foolishly rips off his mask before jumping into the van as it speeds away. You have his picture. You have video evidence of his crime. Being a good citizen, you take your video of the crime to the police, and they arrest you. Because what you did is a crime. Or it could be, in France.

That is, if France criminalizes citizen journalism.

The French Constitutional Council has approved a law that criminalizes the filming or broadcasting of acts of violence by people other than professional journalists. The law could lead to the imprisonment of eyewitnesses who film acts of police violence, or operators of Web sites publishing the images, one French civil liberties group warned on Tuesday.

Appropriately enough, the council's announcement came on the anniversary of the Rodney King beating; a watershed moment in American life, stemming from the increased availability of video cameras, which became a powerful media tool in the hands of citizens who took them into the streets to "police the police." Had the proposed French law existed in the U.S. then, George Holliday -- who captured the incident on video -- would have been a criminal. (But not Bob Tur, the reporter who captured video of Reginald Denny being attacked during the riots that erupted when a jury failed to convict four officers for the King incident, and later sued YouTube for copyright infringement when the video was posted on the site.)

Of course, then even if you had video it wouldn't see the light of day beyond your living room unless you found a television station willing to air it. Fast forward to the present, when even more of us have the capacity to capture video, and it seems like every day there's a new website where we can upload, edit and broadcast that video without having to persuade a producer or station manager.

How has it changed our culture? It's an old story, and we're just living in the latest chapter.

Forty years ago last Monday, Americans saw television footage of the attack on civil rights marchers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. It became known as "Bloody Sunday," and so incensed Americans that demonstrations were held in 80 cities within 48 hours, and Martin Luther King Jr. led thousands on a march across that same bridge two days later. Had ABC not interrupted Judgment at Nuremberg, most Americans wouldn't have see it what happened in Selma that day. That was the power of media then.

Television footage from the Vietnam brought war into America's living rooms, given them a view of the battlefield most would never have seen otherwise. It's said to have been a major factor in turning the tide of public opinion against the war.

No, the great difference between the Vietnam War and its predecessors lay not in its conduct, but its perception, an image that was shaped by a powerful new influence-- television. It was this medium, more than any other single factor, which was instrumental in the shift of American public and Congressional opinion from a position strongly supporting to one strongly condemning the American defense of South Vietnam.

...As the size of the media in Vietnam expanded, so did its impact back home. In 1963, NBC and CBS doubled the length of their national news coverage (from 15 to 30 minutes) and in that same year Americans reported that, for the first time ever, most of them received the majority of their news from television instead of newspapers and magazines.12 Technology kept pace during this period also, with a steady increase in the number, size, and quality of color television sets in American homes. Transportation time of news footage was originally about twenty hours from Vietnam to New York, although this would be decreased dramatically with the availability of communications satellites later in

the war.

That, too, was the power of media then.

The King video gave Americans a look at the kind of violence most wouldn't have seen otherwise, and that wouldn't have been reported beyond its locale -- if at all -- had there not been a citizen with a video camera nearby. Last November, cell phone video footage of a UCLA student being repeatedly tasered by campus police was posted to YouTube. It became one of YouTube's most discussed videos of all time, rocketed around the blogosphere, and caused an outcries against police brutality both online and on campus. Video of Los Angeles Police arresting William Cardenas helped launch an FBI investigation after it was posted online. In another time, news of these incidents wouldn't have spread very far, let alone video footage.

The trend is not limited to the U.S. A video of Malaysian police humiliating a young woman (recorded by another policeman, on his cell phone) also found its way online, causing citizens to demand an investigation.

The clip began circulating phone to phone, e-mail to e-mail. Eventually it was posted on YouTube and other Internet sites, to be viewed by millions. What started as cheap voyeurism escalated into an unstoppable cyberspace phenomenon, which forced the prime minister to establish an official inquiry that led to changes in police practice. The episode also underscored the growing power of amateur video, shot on cellphones and ever-tinier digital cameras, to hold the powerful to account.

The digital revolution is helping to throw light into some of the world's darkest corners. The photos of naked and shackled Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison -- images taken on soldiers' personal digital cameras and made public in 2004 -- focused a global spotlight on abuses there. Ordinary people going about their daily lives are now the first to document historic events.

That is the power of media now, in the hands of "ordinary people."

Beyond crime and acts of violence, the political implications of the kind of law proposed in France should be obvious by now, to anyone who's heard the word "macaca" or seen Michael J. Fox's campaign ads, both of which made APs "Top YouTube Videos of 2006" list.

The case of blogger Josh Wolf is another example. Wolf was jailed in July 2006 for failing to turn over video footage he shot of a San Francisco protest against the G8 summit 2005. In an interview last month, Wolf explained his refusal to comply with

Amy Goodman: On Friday, we spoke with Josh Wolf from his jail cell in Dublin, Calif. I began by asking him why he's in prison.
Josh Wolf: I'm here for refusing to comply with a subpoena demanding that I both testify and turn over a tape of a protest that occurred on July 8, 2005.

AG: Why are you refusing to comply?

JW: Well, there's a number of reasons. It's been viewed that the tape is central to the issue, but it's also the testimony. Essentially, what the government wants me to do, as we can tell, is to identify civil dissidents who were attending this march, who were in mask and clearly did not want to be identified, but whose identities I may know some of, as their contact that I've been following in documenting civil dissent in the San Francisco Bay Area for some two and a half years now.

Meanwhile, CNET Editor Charles Cooper suggests another reason why Wolf's incarceration isn't getting the as much attention as, say, the jailing of New York Times reporter Judy Miller.

Civil liberties-minded folks are upset about the press freedom issues raised by Wolf's imprisonment. But Wolf's self-proclaimed status as a video blogger also opens a Pandora's box the fourth estate would just as soon see remain shut. More than any case I can recall, the Wolf case reflects the changing way journalism is being practiced in the age of Internet bloggers.

Changing the way journalism is practiced, by essentially making journalists of any anyone with cell phone and a broadband connection, has the potential to change much more. It did in South Korea where OhMyNews -- which daily posts tens of thousands of articles by citizen journalists -- was credited with influencing the election of a president. Founder Oh Yeon Ho described the site as a powerful space to coalesce "people power."

“OhmyNews is a kind of public square in which the reform-minded generation meet and talk with each other and find confidence. The message they find here: we are not alone. We can change this society.”

By contrast, the French law would establish government-approved sources of information and bar most citizens from contributing.

The broad drafting of the law so as to criminalize the activities of citizen journalists unrelated to the perpetrators of violent acts is no accident, but rather a deliberate decision by the authorities, said Cohet. He is concerned that the law, and others still being debated, will lead to the creation of a parallel judicial system controlling the publication of information on the Internet.

The government has also proposed a certification system for Web sites, blog hosters, mobile-phone operators and Internet service providers, identifying them as government-approved sources of information if they adhere to certain rules. The journalists’ organization Reporters Without Borders, which campaigns for a free press, has warned that such a system could lead to excessive self censorship as organizations worried about losing their certification suppress certain stories.

"Freedom Fries" aside, it's no stretch of the imagination to consider how much folks on this side of the Atlantic might appreciate a law like this one. In fact, the French law might not go far enough. After all, national security could be at stake and suppressing some of the stories mentioned above would have spared some powerful people a bit or grief, and maybe even helped them hold on to that power.

But that probably wouldn't happen here without some protest. That is, if anyone would risk reporting it.

Juiced about Joost - posted by Jason Rosenberg

Thu, 22 Feb 2007 14:52:07 -0800

A few months back I heard about The Venice Project, one more video player in the ever-growing field of video players. I’m always curious to hear why this player is different than every other player, so I signed up to become a beta tester. I was eager to download the application, until I learned there is no mac version. Who are these people who put out non-mac products? Mac users are first movers and the influentials, but I digress.

A few weeks later, I got an email, under the subject line, “We’re so Joost!” The Venice Project announced that they have changed the name of their project to Joost.

Still no mac…

So I forgot about it.

Earlier this week I got another email from Joost. They have a mac application. Wait, they’ve taken it down.

Now it’s back up! I’ve finally downloaded Joost and at first glance I really like. Joost is a different kind of player from your typical flash player, save the Democracy Player or iTunes, in that you have to first download the application to get it to work. The application is 13 mgs. But unlike the traditional flash players, Joost has its own content, a lot of it!

Joost’s original channels include music from Diddy’s Channel featuring artists like Young Joc. Warner Music has a channel so do the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Green Day. Joost has content from EchoDitto client Lime and Indycar and National Geographic.

On top of short content from these content providers, Joost features full length movies on its IndyFlix channel.

As if I can’t say enough already about Joost, it has a Widgets menu where users can instant message, read a newsticker, rate videos and chat. I guess chat is somehow different than instant message. Since Joost is full screen, they even provide users with a clock widget so they don’t lose track of time while watching all of Joost’s content.

Joost represents the future of television. No longer is there a need to worry about time restrictions, why are shows 30 and 60 minutes? There is no restriction to the type or the amount of content. Look at all these different channels. Content is easily targeted to niche demographics but at the same users have the option to discover more.

Go to Joost.com to apply to become a beta tester. Then drop me a line in the comments section to tell me what you think about the product.

Update: Viacom announced Feb. 22, that they will provide content to Joost.

You said it, Vilsack! - posted by Michael Silberman

Tue, 19 Dec 2006 21:57:58 -0800

Was just catching up on last night's Daily Show and heard Tom Vilsack sneak in a plug for his website at the very end of his appearance. Truly impressive -- congrats to you, Tom, as well as the staff who did whatever they did to convince you of the importance of this.

This must seem obvious to some of you, but for some reason it's near impossible to get most traditional PR and comms people to make this a priority when prepping their candidate or spokesperson for TV. The exceptions are those who understand that mentioning the URL on air makes the gift of the TV appearance keep on giving by sending viewers to a medium where they can do a lot more than watch...

Sometimes the media folks are good about trying to get the news outlet to include the URL at the bottom of the screen, but even that's a longshot. So when someone from a camapign or organization sneaks in a website address during their TV appearance, as several of our clients have been doing lately, it's music to our ears (... or happy emoticons to our screens).