Well, foreign or Scottish, that is.

This video is the result of an article that ran the other day in the LA Times, on the good sales of the iPhone 4s in Scotland, despite Siri’s trouble with the Scots’ “foreign” accents. Be warned, there is profanity.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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Next Friday, February 10th, we’re putting on a Flipthemedia mixer at Big Time Brewery in the U-District from 6-9pm. It’s all about getting together, having a few drinks and talking casually about digital media. Something right in between a focused happy hour and just hanging out on a Friday evening. Our idea is to make this an informal gathering where people get in the same room and have a few good laughs as we promote Flipthemedia and introduce the editorial staff currently involved with the site.

Big things are brewing with us in 2012 and we’d love to have people come by Big Time Brewery for a drink (or three) and figure out better ways to work together in the future.

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Two of the main reasons that I decided to study abroad was to learn more about how wearable computers can be used to change the way we communicate and to better understand the technological differences between the US and Germany. For some reason I had grand illusions that Europe and especially Germany was more technologically advanced than a lot of other countries including the US. What I found was a large digital divide between regions, age groups and social classes much like we have here in the US.

Studying abroad notably affected and broadened my career goals although it didn’t cause me to want to live or work in another country. In fact it caused me to realize how lucky I am to be in Seattle. On the other hand though, studying in Germany was fascinating because of the way higher education is structured. Graduate students are paid to work full-time on their research projects instead of competing for various scholarships.

Now that I’m back in the job market I’m testing out just how important studying abroad is to employers, but so far it seems to line up with the numbers below. One thing that kind of surprised me while I was away was how many small business ideas kept popping up. Everything from bicycle tube vending machines to competing bars with self-serve touch-screen taps.

Credit: Course Hero

If you’re still not convinced that studying abroad is worth your money, check out this TEDx talk from November with Rick Steves. While he isn’t necessarily advocating for studying abroad, his point is that spending time away from home will likely broaden your perspective and enrich your life. While I’m by no means the world traveler he is, I would have to agree; “fear is for people who don’t get out very much.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

If you’ve studied abroad or are thinking about it please let us know your thoughts below in the comments.

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The app would provide walking directions with large blue dots over areas in which ten or more criminal incidents have occurred over the past 12 months. I assume that this must be a very small area, limited to one or two particularly dangerous blocks, because Capitol Hill has had over 2,000 crimes last year, according to SPD crime records—which would mean one of Seattle’s most vibrant neighborhoods earns a big old blue dot.  For some, the implications of this app are irrefutable: avoid the ghetto, avoid “black and hispanic neighborhoods,” avoid low-income areas. For others, this particular feature fits logically within a GPS app that also helps pedestrians avoid impassable roads and dangerous weather conditions—remaining safe is as much avoiding violent crime as it is avoiding busy streets with no sidewalks, for example.

Certainly there are benefits to a map app that keeps tabs on road closures, one-way streets, dead ends, and dangerous pedestrian intersections. Last year I found myself in LA trying to cross a four lane highway without a crosswalk because my phone’s directions app didn’t account for LA’s car-centric culture.

Of course, the app makes no literal mention of the word ghetto, and many have been quick to come to its defense, even African-American writer Maurice Garland, who says, “If you don’t want to end up in those places, I don’t see anything wrong with somebody trying to help you out.” Undoubtedly many of us have received advice from friends to avoid certain places in certain cities based on their own personal experiences.

I find the implications of this app more subtly disturbing—if we never get lost, how will we ever discover? If every move we make is filtered through a phone that counsels us to avoid entire swaths of inhabited city blocks, how will we ever stumble upon those awesome dive bars or bakeries or bookstores that make living in these crowded cities worth it all?

Juanita Wallace (pictured on the left) provides a more compelling argument than just never getting lost—she cites damage to local economies as one of the more concrete arguments against the app. “It’s almost like gerrymandering, she said. ‘It’s stereotyping for sure and without a doubt; I can’t emphasize enough, it’s discriminatory.”

Tourism looks to either win or lose, depending on your opinion, and one Dallas tourist already spoke out against it: “[The neighborhood] may have a high crime problem, but have some great cultural and social things you can do there.”

Microsoft was awarded the patent for the app but it is not available on the market yet. There’s been no word from Microsoft reps on if the app will actually become an official product given the current dust-up.

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Visitor flow visualization

A powerful tool in understanding visitor behavior the flow visualization “tracks” user navigation through web pages within your site. For example, we see users coming to FTM from the Internet, and a smaller percentage browses further into the site reading other posts. For a site that is designed to retain user attention, or to encourage users to complete certain processes like entering data or completing a sale, visitor flow provides clues that site designers can use to improve outcomes.

In Site Analytics

Another great visualization tool puts analytics data directly on a site. This is an effective tool for web designers to see what works and what does not. It is like a map of user activities. It definitely helps designers to experiment with changing the layout and placement or look and feel of a sites based on actual user feedback.

Mobile

With the surging share of Internet access coming from smart phones, Google Analytics can track mobile websites and mobile apps. Tracking traffic to a mobile website from all web-enabled devices is enabled by adding a server side code snippet. More so, iPhone and Android mobile applications can now also track how users engage and interact, just as with tracking engagement on a website.

Site speed

Site speed provides performance measurement of user experiences.  A web page taking too long to load may send users away. Designers can use the information to balance between richness of content and performance to optimize user experience. Technically, site speed provides break down of redirection, domain lookup, server response, as well as network latency time. This is valuable information to determine where the improvements may come from.

It is worth noting that Google Analytics still has a lot of limitations. For example, bounce rate and time spent on page can be misleading. This is particularly true when a reader reads only the front page of a site. If a visit involves only one page, regardless of the amount of time spent on it, it is considered a bounce. Since Google Analytics calculates average time on site is by subtracting the timestamps between the first and the last page view of a visit, it is unable to calculate average time on site for visitors without a second page view.  Furthermore, there is currently no way for Google Analytics to know exactly when a visitor left the site since it is not informed when the visitor closes their browser or navigates to a different site. This may change in the future when browser codes are integrated with analytics, which will require cooperation among vendors to establish consistent standards.

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Like a perfectly tuned bicycle wheel, the spokes of a well crafted digital media campaign need to be in balance and connect to the central campaign hub. Digital media brings in a new set of opportunities to connect with consumers and more accurate technologies to measure reach and impact. To find out how to effectively manage the digital media channels and tools,  I interviewed co-founders and digital media experts Mike Whitmore and Jeff Dance from Fresh Consulting.

We talked about the fact that digital marketing evolves and changes quickly and popular platforms emerge to importance and then can become quickly abandoned by the digital crowd (e.g., MySpace).

Mike explained that it can be really hard for companies to figure out which platforms to engage with and that “once a firm dives into digital media having a meaningful presence on multiple sites can seem like boiling the ocean.”

He also shared that firms can avoid getting caught up in this often overwhelming challenge “by approaching the task using an organized and proven methodology based on a hub & spoke approach.” Jeff outlined the model on a napkin for me, represented in the graphic below.

Jeff explained that the company’s website (their hub or “core” website) becomes the focus of attention. All of their external media assets (the spokes) point towards, drive traffic to or create measureable and, hopefully, meaningful interactions with their core website. These efforts are all part of the overall marketing, brand-messaging and lead-generation efforts.

Mike indicated that “most people get the model since it is easy to conceptualize, but the implementation and execution is more complex.” Understanding the types of content for the hub and spokes and how they interrelate and support brand messaging takes discipline and expertise. “Firms must be aware that each one of these new channels reaches audiences differently and the content at the spokes becomes as vital as the messaging and call-to-action at the hub. Each spoke also presents some level of inherent risk to the brand and must be managed with care,” he said.

As with racing wheels, the number of spokes or channels for an effective media campaign can vary.  Mike illustrated the point by reviewing seven spokes they used in a recent case study:

1. BRAND: Link your brand to creative content, campaigns, and social engagement to communicate the key messages to consumers.
2. CONTENT: Produce and re-purpose creative content that will excite sales teams, motivate resellers or interest the end consumer to check it out.
3. CHANNELS: Create an integrated presence in new general and niche social media channels and engage the sales team to listen to their customers and build community.
4. CAMPAIGNS: Include creative new campaigns that will acquaint customers with the new hot product or service, its growth and relevance to them
5. TEAM: Include training materials and responsibilities for the leadership and employees involved to lay the groundwork for building a social media team.
6. TOOLS: Include new tools that will support channel engagement, measurement, and listening.
7. MEASUREMENT: Address what key metrics are important to the client and how to tie metrics to financial measurement.

Well that certainly looks good, but will it work? We will put it to the test with some startup companies and brands right here at the University of Washington. For example, how does the MCDM program levereage the model? What can the Global Social Entrepreneurship Competition (GSEC) do differently to create a balanced digital media strategy? Expect a monthly post this year on the hub and spoke model. We will share best practices for developing and managing content within the spokes.

If you would like your product or company to be considered for one of the posts, drop me a line at samrosen@uw.edu or @rosenbalm

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• November 9, 2010 -- Windows Phone 7: Could Mobile Gaming Be Microsoft’s Ticket? (21)

Within thirty seconds of the BBC publishing a quotation from me on the latest round of the nymwars and Google+, my phone rang. Caller ID indicated that it was my colleague at Google. “Had I said something wrong?” was my first thought. I quickly retraced in my mind what it was that I had said to the journalist; I had responded in the article that Google’s recent announcement could be seen as positive but really it was a sidestepping of the larger challenge of identity management. Yes, I’m surprised that the BBC printed the quotation too. Must have been a slow news day.

I answered the phone with trepidation, wondering if it was something I had said. Then I learned quickly that no, it was something that Google had done. It felt like 2010 all over again, that terrible year when Google released Buzz. And announced WiSpy. And countless ridiculous statements from Eric Schmidt

This time Google announced that they were only merging their privacy policies under one single policy. This was the small development. This is not a good idea for so many boring reasons that most people won’t quite understand. People don’t read privacy policies. They are almost always inane statements of things that we are not meant to understand unless you are a privacy geek or a lawyer. What I liked about Google’s previous myriad of policies, and other organizations with detailed policies, was that if you cared enough to read it you could find out exactly what Google was doing with your personal information. By bringing them altogether under one regime, the risk of vagueness increases. A privacy policy may become even more pointless for everyone involved.

But the main development from Google, and linked to the nymwars announcement, is that this was all about identity management.

Desktop Deviation
In the world of the desktop computer, you have an operating system that cares not about who you are. It just asks if you have the privileges to install new applications, make core changes to the operating system, etc. Identity is meaningless.

In turn, you run applications. Your email client allows you to have multiple email addresses, and in turn multiple identities. I have three different accounts; I know people with many more (work, play, clubs and hobbies, etc.). Then you have a calendar — or like many people, many calendars (again, work, play, clubs, family, friends, etc.). These apps don’t really care about who you are, but the servers involved may: for instance, your work email server may care that you are the employee you purport to be before letting you download information.

In essence, you are the master of your domain and can have as many identities as possible. You can even set up multiple users on your computer. Your operating system may know the links between your identities, but it really doesn’t care. But Google does care, and this is the real change that is occurring.

Google’s Ambition
Google is trying to move everything off your desktop. This is not necessarily problematic, though it does raise some security and privacy implications, but I’m not going to belabor those, at least not on this occasion.

Where Google is going wrong is that it wants all these identities to be merged into one single identity: you. Previously, you had a Gmail account; and separately at YouTube account, Buzz, G+. Now they want one policy and one identity to rule them all. They believe there is only one you, and that they need to know it.

I’m not saying necessarily they want your rank, file and serial number. In a sense, this was resolved slightly with the announcement last Monday that Google+ would permit you to have a pseudonym. But they still expect that beneath that nickname, Google will still know you.

Yes, you can fake your name. But this isn’t about your name. It is about your identity. Google is imagining a world where you only have one identity at the core of everything. And they want to know that core: that beneath that nickname, there is someone who’s interests they know based on your emails, searches, locations, friends, etc. Across all their platforms they want to treat you as a single person. Sure you can have multiple email accounts, multiple calendars, etc., but they want to know the person behind it all.

My computer cares not about who is behind all of the activities. But now your mobile phone that runs Android will signal to Google what you do; Gmail will signal what you do; when logged in, search will do the same, as will all the other products and services.

Google is doing this for two reasons. The first is obvious: they can better know what to advertise to you. This is not inherently a terrible thing, and they let you opt out if you want, or you can log out of some services if you like; and Google is notable for letting you have access to some of the data that they hold on you. It’s not like they’re a government and want to know everything about you, or create an ID card in order to monitor your activities.

Except, that this is the second reason: Google wants to be able to provide an ID card equivalent for the Internet. And there’s a reason why.

Blame Facebook
Facebook has been quickly moving to establish itself as the ‘identity layer’ for the internet. Want to log in to your favorite newspaper’s website? You can of course create a username and ID, or you can use your Facebook account. Spotify has done this as well. By doing so, Facebook can become part of the transaction. And Facebook can also know what it is you’re up to.

Facebook does want to know your name. And it will boot you off for not giving the right one. And Facebook believes anonymity is bad. This is because they want to advertise to you, and to know you. And they want to make billions of dollars doing so. Governments may be keen to identify internet users, but Facebook is actively changing the rules of the internet, for their own purposes.

Google wants some of this pie. After all, it can better know you for advertising purposes if it is involved in your interactions outside of Google’s services. Sure they know your email use, and your mobile phone usage; but they don’t quite know your wider use of the internet on domains they do not own. But if they were part of the authentication process, they could know ever more about you.

Optimism?
The most amusing thing is that 12 years ago Microsoft tried the same thing with its Passport. They wanted to hold on to all the keys for all your accounts, to make life easier for you. But nobody, for good reason, trusted Microsoft. How did Microsoft respond? They went off and started to do some fascinating research and product development on novel identity systems that empowered users, allowed multiple identities, selective disclosure, and resisted models where powerful central bodies oversaw all transactions.

But Microsoft knows best how to kill off good products, and so nothing much has happened with all that great research and development. This is where Google, if it is as smart as we all believe it is, can succeed: develop an online identity environment where there is no one central God overlooking every transaction, playing the role of authenticator in chief.

Unfortunately, so long as two of the enfants terrible of Internet privacy compete against each other for revenues and control, we’ll have to watch from the sidelines as bad ideas are embedded into key internet services and labelled as ‘innovation’. And in today’s environment, we can’t question innovation .

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• November 9, 2009 -- An Ode to Contemplation (32)
• October 14, 2011 -- MCDM’s Toast to a Bully (29)
• February 25, 2008 -- Flip Video Vlog: Codecs and You! (25)
• November 9, 2010 -- Windows Phone 7: Could Mobile Gaming Be Microsoft’s Ticket? (21)

Look no further than the “dangers” of political polarization highlighted during Dr. David Tewksbury’s hour-long lecture launching the University of Washington’s Winter 2012 Colloquium Series.

The deeply divisive influences of cable TV and Internet news are accentuated by too many outlets simply “capturing a slice of the audience”; then selectively “shaping content” to attract likeminded listeners and viewers, said Tewksbury, head of the Department of Communication and Associate Professor with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

But is this the doing of the proverbial devil so often found in the details? Or maybe a blessing in disguise? More on those questions in a minute, but Tewksbury makes clear one of his research assumptions before diving into the vast ocean of online news:

Polarization is bad.

Tewksbury points to predictions that the proliferation of content options in high bandwidth media will “distract” people from the day’s big news stories along with important information about public affairs. He believes the “terms of our citizenship” are long since a slippery slope because of how these very terms are so inconsistently defined.

In his fascinating, fast-paced presentation – “Terms of Citizenship: Defining where Online News is Taking Us” – Tewksbury breathed new life into what he insists must be a “common set of terms” defined by absolute consistency:

• Specialization
• Segmentation
• Fragmentation
• Polarization

“These [outcomes] impair the function of democracies, but there is a surprising lack of agreement among scholars about just what these terms mean,” Tewksbury said. “We need to build a coherent set of definitions for them and sketch the connections among them.”

DEFINING TERMS

Specialization

Site specialization focuses on what Tewksbury calls a particular subset of hard news content and any consumption of this content, he said, “reflects a conscious choice by audience members” engaged in “selective exposure.” It is analogous to a newspaper, TV or radio site focusing on national defense or the economy after one of the long series of GOP presidential debates.

Segmentation

Segmentation essentially optimizes the marketing strategy of matching a news outlet’s established audience to advertisers selling services or products to viewers or listeners safely assumed to be tuning in or frequenting a site. Think New York Times or Wall Street Journal readers versus those of USA Today.

Fragmentation

Dissolution of news exposure, public affairs knowledge and ideological beliefs into subsets of our society is Tewksbury’s definition of fragmentation. Public political discussion leads to a more meaningful political knowledge which, in turn, helps to shape various political agendas. “Use of any one outlet limits exposure to the total body of news,” he said. “People spread themselves across available news options.”

Polarization

Cable TV’s loudest, most classic echo chambers are found at MSNBC (“Lean Forward”) and Fox News Channel (“Fair and Balanced”), where polarization is warmly embraced as a very profitable enterprise. By appealing – if not pandering – to their respective viewers, each of these news outlets can effectively brand itself accordingly.

Tewksbury said echo chambers create “internal consistency” within any group whose primary focus is on the “relative homogeneity” of its membership.

CONNECTING DOTS

How content specialization and audience segmentation open a Pandora’s Box of fragmentation and polarization is the premise of Tewksbury’s research suggesting an agenda for testing “some of the more dire predictions” about the effects of large-scale adoption of high bandwidth media. Yet, even assuming a link is discovered, should proving such a connection cause fear or dread (the very definition of “dire”)?

Tewksbury’s new book, News on the Internet: Information and Citizenship in the 21st Century, raises red flags over our contemporary news environment. But our past shows us how often the passage of time charms all history – meaning feelings of nostalgia for the “good old days” can be strangely deceiving.

Was America’s almost blind trust in Murrow, Cronkite and Brinkley truly preferable to our Internet-fueled freedom to pick and choose from whom we receive the day’s news – especially our political news?

Thomas Jefferson famously expressed his belief that newspapers were more likely to preserve our democracy than the very government guaranteeing our freedom to write, publish and speak what we want.

“Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them.” –Thomas Jefferson, 1787

It is worth noting Jefferson spoke of a vibrant and innovative media sector. He warned neither of dissent nor polarization; rather he preached the importance of citizens’ literacy and their unfettered access to all available news.

More than a century-and-a-half before high bandwidth media, a songwriter penned of President Martin Van Buren: “[He] deserves the lowest place in hell.” Today such venom would be greeted instantly by condemning tweets and hundreds, probably thousands, of blistering blogs.

Discerning who is best trusted for filtering the relevant, most important news of the day is a lot like judging the Westminster Dog Show. Only one person is liberated to choose the “top dog.” Why?

To avoid any appearance of conflicting opinion or polarization.

But America’s news consumers should embrace both of those blessings in disguise.

Most Commented Posts

• November 21, 2008 -- Crowdsourcing: Name the New MCDM Center! (37)
• November 9, 2009 -- An Ode to Contemplation (32)
• October 14, 2011 -- MCDM’s Toast to a Bully (29)
• February 25, 2008 -- Flip Video Vlog: Codecs and You! (25)
• November 9, 2010 -- Windows Phone 7: Could Mobile Gaming Be Microsoft’s Ticket? (21)