Month: February 2009

Categories
politics twitter

Like James Bond Villain, Virginia GOP tells hero the plan, lets him escape

It seems that like a James Bond Villain, the Virginia GOP chairman told the hero the outcome before it actually happened, allowing him to get away. Via Talking Points Memo:

TPMDC | Talking Points Memo | Virginia GOP Chairman’s Twitter Outreach: Massive Fail

Yesterday the Virginia GOP came very close to taking control of the state Senate, nearly luring a Democratic Senator to switch parties and put them at a 20-20 tie, which would have been broken by the Republican Lt. Governor. Then Jeff Frederick, a state legislator and the party chairman, ruined it all by Twittering this:

“Big news coming out of Senate: Apparently one dem is either switching or leaving the dem caucus. Negotiations for power sharing underway.”

The Democrats saw the message and prevented the person from switching sides.

This only reminds me of the scene from Austin Powers:

Dr. Evil:
All right guard, begin the unnecessarily slow-moving dipping mechanism.

[guard starts dipping mechanism]

Dr. Evil:
Close the tank!

Scott Evil:
Wait, aren’t you even going to watch them? They could get away!

Dr. Evil:
No no no, I’m going to leave them alone and not actually witness them dying, I’m just gonna assume it all went to plan. What?

Scott Evil:
I have a gun, in my room, you give me five seconds, I’ll get it, I’ll come back down here, BOOM, I’ll blow their brains out!

Dr. Evil:
Scott, you just don’t get it, do ya? You don’t.

Categories
marketing media social networks socialmedia

Clay on Why Small Payments won’t save Publishers

Clay spends a large portion of this article explaining how Micropayments, or small payments, won’t save large publishers. The real meat, to me, is in this almost-final paragraph:
Why Small Payments Won’t Save Publishers « Clay Shirky

Meanwhile, back in the real world, the media business is being turned upside down by our new freedoms and our new roles. We’re not just readers anymore, or listeners or viewers. We’re not customers and we’re certainly not consumers. We’re users. We don’t consume content, we use it, and mostly what we use it for is to support our conversations with one another, because we’re media outlets now too. When I am talking about some event that just happened, whether it’s an earthquake or a basketball game, whether the conversation is in email or Facebook or Twitter, I want to link to what I’m talking about, and I want my friends to be able to read it easily, and to share it with their friends.

This is where my reality lies. I seem to get a huge volume of information daily, but the best information comes from my friends (and by friends, I mean both those who I really know and spend time with, and those who are in name-only on social networks).

Clay names this ‘superdistribution’ – the sharing of content from friend to friend. I’m more likely to learn about breaking news from @breakingnewson on Twitter or someone re-tweeting that than I am by reading NYTimes.com these days. And that, in a nutshell, is a big problem for the Times. It is not un-solvable. And I do believe people at NYT are thinking about it. It will be interesting to see how quickly that translates to action.