Investigative journalist Nick Davies holds forth on the phone-hacking scandal at News of the World. Few things could cast the need for ethics into sharper relief.
George “Loki” Williams is the owner of SocialGumbo, LLC
Unlike a lot of people out there I’ve had my laptop hooked up to my TV for years. I’ve gone through a variety of ways to watch my favorite programs over that time and I must confess that Hulu Plus has left me cold.
I was very excited about a paid version of Hulu, not because I enjoy spending money but because I loved the idea of seamless integration with my iPhone and my Playstation 3 (which I mainly use as a media server) . Alas that integration is no where ready for prime time.
Hulu Plus is the paid version of Hulu. It’s two stated points of differentiation are being able to playback over multiple devices and access to full seasons of current shows. In my opinion it would be more than worth the $7.99 a month if the playback were smooth. It is not. Far from it in fact.
In almost two months of trying it out I was not able to watch a single thing without the video hanging up repeatedly. This was especially true when the commercials would come on. Personally I do not object to a few 15-30 second commercials in my programs, after all they do need to generate revenue to continue the service.
What I do object to is the fact that as often as not viewing gets held up, sometimes for over a minute at a time, as the commercial has problems loading. This was true on a number of devices:
If Hulu can get the bugs out of it I’ll happily resubscribe to the service, but at this point the interface is just not robust enough to charge for.
George “Loki” Williams is the owner of SocialGumbo, LLC
Image: Hulu Plus Logo / Fair Use: Reporting
Our recent domain issues seem to be near resolution now. Hopefully SocialGumbo.com and SocialGumbo.net will be fixed and aimed back here. In the meantime please update your links and addressbooks by changing links from SocialGumbo.com to socialgumbo.com.
Thank you for your patience!
George “Loki” Williams is the owner of SocialGumbo, LLC
George “Loki” Williams is the owner of SocialGumbo, LLC
Sometimes your run across something in your twitter stream that just makes you immediately unfollow that person. Many times this is caused by political or religious content, other times it is the dreaded sledge hammer like barrage of sales pitches.
Now I’d be the last one to say brands and businesses should not use social media, but I would suggest developing some basic familiarity with it before diving in. Case in point: I had recently followed a small business on twitter. I was already interested in them and went into it knowing that a lot of the content would probably be broadcast style (i.e. all projecting outwards rather than being interactive and personal). I had opted in and was good with it.
Then I discovered that every few hours or so I would be barraged with about 15-20 tweets in a row from this account, effectively clogging my twitter stream each time. What made it even worse was discovering that this biz has several different twitter accounts that would each send out burst content like this. As you may imagine a rapid series of unfollows occurred.
Think about what the people seeing your content see. Ten tweets for ten different products sent out that rapidly can completely block up some-one’s tweet stream. Is this the type of thing you would want to see when logging into your account? It’s like the guy at the really great party who wants to talk to you about insurance, even if you need a policy the barrage of sales talk will likely turn you off. Even just spacing these out more instead of ten at a time bursts would be an acceptable alternative.
This also brings to mind one or to other things you can do to get more out of twitter:
See, now wasn’t that easy? There is a ton of “noise” on most social media channels, these simple steps will help you in not accidentally becoming part of it.
George “Loki” Williams is the owner of SocialGumbo, LLC
There has been a lot of furor over the disclosure guidelines recently put forth by the FTC. On a personal and professional level it really makes no difference to me. All you have to do is click the Transparency link in my sidebar and you’ll see a full disclosure for the website and then additional case by case ones on individual posts. I always advocate transparency both in my own work and to my clients.
That said, I think that while the FTC guidelines may seem a fine idea at first I don’t believe they are. First and foremost is the fact that no print media, or its extended presence on the Internet , is subject anything like these rules. Double standards are never a good thing, especially in legal matters.
Then there are the free speech issues inherent in a double standard applied to news and information. Chris Crum on WebProNews has a nice post about it, including this bit about the stance taken by the IAB:
The IAB [Interactive Advertising Bureau] says the rules unfairly and unconstitutionally impose penalties on online media for practices in which offline media have engaged for decades. In an open letter to FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz, Randall Rothenberg, the President and CEO of the IAB, called the FTC’s distinction between offline media and online media, “constitutionally dubious.”
“What concerns us the most in these revisions is that the Internet, the cheapest, most widely accessible communications medium ever invented, would have less freedom than other media,” he said. “These revisions are punitive to the online world and unfairly distinquish between the same speech, based on the medium in which it is delivered. The practices have long been afforded strong First Amendment protections in traditional media outlets, but the Commission is saying that the same speech deserves fewer Constitutional protections online. I urge the Commission to retract the current set of Guides and to commence a fair and open process in order to develop a roadmap by which responsible online actors can engage with consumers and continue to provide the invaluable content and services that have so transformed people’s lives.”
Net Neutrality and freedom of speech are fundamental underpinnings of the modern Internet. We are in the midst of the greatest revolution in the access people have to information since the advent of movable type. Even though it will not affect how I operate it is still of massive import to all of us who work and write on the net.
Mr. Crum points out another valid point in another article of his:
Well-known author/editor/publisher Jeff Jarvis makes a really good point. He says the FTC assumes that the Internet is a medium. “It’s not. It’s a place where people talk. Most people who blog, as Pew found in a survey a few years ago, don’t think they are doing anything remotely connected to journalism. I imagine that virtually no one on Facebook thinks they’re making media. They’re connecting. They’re talking,” he says. “So for the FTC to go after bloggers and social media – as they explicitly do – is the same as sending a government goon into Denny’s to listen to the conversations in the corner booth and demand that you disclose that your Uncle Vinnie owns the pizzeria whose product you just endorsed.”
That really is the core of the matter here. Social media platforms are arenas of conversation. This sort of regulation, besides being unenforceable, is supremely out of place.
If you do reviews or any other form of blogging that involves brands or products you might want to check out DisclosurePolicy.org, which is what I used to generate the one you see on this website. It’s a quick, free, and easy tool to use and will help keep you on the ethical side of transparency no matter which way this is resolved.
What are YOUR thoughts on the issue? Let us know here or on our Facebook Page!
George “Loki” Williams is the owner of SocialGumbo, LLC
George “Loki” Williams is the owner of SocialGumbo, LLC
People all over the world experienced an outage the like of which we have not seen since the days the Fail Whale became a pop culture image. Twitter went down hard, no Fail Whale, no API access from third party services like HootSuite and Tweetdeck, nothing. Hours of nothing.
@djmatao LOL. Denial of Service attack caused millions of Twitter users to suddenly become — productive!
It seems the service, which has been growing at an astounding pace, was subject to a Denial-of-Service attack. Things seem to be back up as of now but word from twitter is that they are still fighting it. In an interesting note I’ve noticed that Facebook slowed to a crawl and Livejournal was completely inaccessible for and hour or two this morning as well. While there is nothing to link these events and no word of a DDOS attack from either company it still makes for a rough time in the social sphere. [Edit: Livejournal confirms DDOS attack. - Loki]
It does illustrate the persistence of early impressions. Twitter has had an amazing 98%+ uptime since its growth really started to balloon yet the spectre of the frequently sighted Fail Whale looms over it even yet. This is a DDOS attack, something completely different.
I cannot guarantee this will continue t work with the issues twitter is having, but here is a real time stream of tweets talking about “denial of service”:
Update:
Fail Whale illustration by @yiyinglu
