Update: KING-5 interview on social media and the job hunt.

I advise about-to-be-graduating students, people thinking about political office, and folks in the job hunt to double-check privacy settings on their social networks. I suggest that they restrict their photos to “intimate friends” (my language) and not “the world.”

However, I don’t do a good enough job of advising them to double-check their significant other’s privacy settings.

Sir John Sawers, newly appointed MI6 chief, has learned that lesson the hard way.
Read more…

MCDM’s Kathy Gill talks with Tim Reha at the Seattle Wine Awards in early June. The UWMCDM new media team working the event — Annie, Filiz, Meg, Rubi — helped Washington wineries get started with their Twitter accounts and live-tweeted the event (with text and photos). Ladies, we could not have done it without you!

I feel like I’m living on the cusp of the world Orson Scott Card created with Ender’s Game, a world where anonymous internet posters Locke and Demosthenes shaped global public opinion. Today, public opinion is increasingly shaped by discourse on the Internet, although we don’t have two clear antagonists in the online public sphere. Case in point: Iran and Twitter.

But what, exactly, do we know about Twitter and the Iranian election?

We know that opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi and his supporters have used Twitter as a platform to claim that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stole last week’s election. We do not know if these claims are accurate, although the Guardian Council is investigating 646 poll complaints.

We know that Twitter has helped spread false information: that 3 million people protested Monday in Tehran (rather tens or hundreds of thousands, according to newspaper reports); that Mousavi was put under house arrest (he appeared at the protests); and that, last Saturday, the president of the election monitoring committee declared the election invalid (not reported by any news organization although the committee is investigating hundreds of claims). Read more…

OK, folks, today is the last day to pre-register for PresentationCamp Seattle for the low-low-low price of $10!

It’s going to be a fun day exploring the good (and the ugly) of presentations, with the ultimate goal of never again having to sit through (or, worse yet, deliver) a “death by Powerpoint” presentation.

Ticket prices jump to $15.99 on April Fool’s Day! Details at the PresentationCamp Seattle wiki. We have more than 70 folks registered!

After reading my “No More Free Content” post, a colleague observed (in an email) that information consumers “pay” for content with both attention (”monetized and sold to advertisers”) and “direct payment to content producers.” [Note: there is no direct payment for broadcast TV, radio and alternative papers like The Seattle Weekly or The Stranger.]

This colleague believes that the challenge facing newspapers is not a “paid vs. free” issue. Instead, the challenge is the ratio of “monetized” attention to direct reader payment.

Attention (monetized or otherwise) is finite, limited. For example,  if I only have 40 minutes or so for “TV,” if I choose to watch DoctorWho, then I can’t watch Lost. (I know it’s an hour-long show; we have a DVR and skip commercials. Also, see opportunity cost.)

Read the remainder of this post on WiredPen.

I think that if I hear another newspaper person utter this phrase — no more free content — I will scream. It’s either that or shoot the guy. (It’s almost always a guy.)

The latest missive to feature this demand comes from David Carr, writing in the Sunday New York Times (tip). Howard Kurtz alluded to it when writing about the demise of The Rocky Mountain News, asserting that “newspapers feel compelled to give away their content.” It was also a theme at the “No News Is Bad News” event in Seattle in February.

Why is this demand driving me crazy?

The implication in the “no more free content” meme — that all would be right in the newspapering world if online readers would just ante up — rests on a false assumption. News and information consumers, in the main, do not “pay” for news content! In my lifetime, all mass media have “given away” their content. There are exceptions (Consumer Reports comes to mind) but the “no more free content” folks are not talking about niche magazines: they’re talking about local daily newspapers.

Read the rest of this post at WiredPen

Mobile applications might provide a new business model for some artists, according to one of my students who has been researching the music industry this quarter. Last month, for example, the Presidents of the United States of America released an iPhone application containing four of their albums, plus rarities, live tracks and demos. The cost? $3.

Because the songs are streamed from the application, this distribution method should not cut into MP3 sales. That’s an important observation. At Gnomedex three years ago, Dave Dederer described how the band made as much as 80 percent of their revenue from the iTunes store.

Today I read in Fierce Mobile Content that Matt Groening’s long-running (22 years) comic Life In Hell will soon vanish from the pages of the LA Weekly. Jason Ankeny goes on to argue … you guessed it … that Life In Hell and other comics would be “natural on a Kindle or on an iPhone.” And it’s not just because these two devices offer a revenue model that the open web does not:

Read The Rest of This (Very Long) Post At WiredPen

An MCDMer in COM546 is being featured on the “health & medicine channel” section at Slideshare.net today. His project for the quarter: researching the evolution of health communication with the goal of forecasting a possible future direction (while learning about things like diffusion of innovation theory in the process, of course!).

This week and next, students have about 12 minutes to share highlights of their work with their peers and take a question or two. That performance includes a requirement to develop visuals to enhance their message, with a goal of breaking away from Powerpoint-as-usual. His presentation (still draft today) clearly meets that goal!

Post first appeared at WiredPen.