Lisa Padilla on Media and Culture

(Dee Luo) This must be as old a debate as any words invented to use in a debate. Technology versus human culture. Many 3rd world tribes have several feelings against media. The Maasai in Kenya and Tanzania prefer not to have their pictures taken because they think it will take their spirit away. The Armish as don't like it either but this is more directly to do with technology. From About.com: "The Amish are averse to any technology which they feel weakens the family structure. The conveniences that the rest of us take for granted such as electricity, television, automobiles, telephones and tractors are considered to be a temptation that could cause vanity, create inequality, or lead the Amish away from their close-knit community and, as such, are not encouraged or accepted in most orders. Most Amish cultivate their fields with horse-drawn machinery, live in houses without electricity, and get around in horse-drawn buggies. It is common for Amish communitie...

Read this if: 1. you are a blogger, or micro-blogger, you use social media like Facebook, you Tube, Twitter, Posterous, Wordpress, or other Web 2.0 companies with overly cute names, 2. you found yourself at a dead end or limit within your blogging or media distribution software service, or 3. you know your business goal but can't find a way to reach it using the tools you have now. I would like your thoughts for an upcoming project that will adress as many of these issues as we can, empowering businesses of any size, from 1-person to hundred, take advantage of the real-time web, and give you a set of tools that make doing business easier, period. A. What do you wish your blogging platform, or service, did for you today? B. What's missing in terms or tools or features? C. Is social media working for you? Are you using it? Is it included in your blog or on your web site? D. What's the biggest challenge you face: marketing, community management, customer relationship managemen...

Earlier than projected, BNO News launched news wire service focused on "providing comprehensive breaking news coverage to news media companies around the world." Msnbc.com will be the first of the service's new clients. This is a telling step in the direction of what are critical media and newspaper organizations transforming themselves into a new type of news reporting. This is one that will ultimately be more accurate and comprehensive, but that will bring it's own challenges, yet the information dissemination, democratic involvement and the anticipatory services that will begin to surface will unwrap a significant communications shift, and subsequently, a multitude of world and cultural views and interaction changes. BNO and many others are helping build in this direction. You can follow them at @BreakingNews on Twitter and through their iPhone application (BNO Breaking News). The service puts together Twitter updates and headlines from other sources, "up-t...

So many people are talking about real-time search and its integrity. Check out this chart from hthe AdMob Mobile Metrics Report (January 2009). AdMob serves ads for more than 6,000 mobile web sites and 400 applications around the world. Suggest a look at the larger picture. While personal brands have their place, the above graph shows some interesting data. What's that dip in Chinese traffic?

Have you noticed that Bank of America has settled in, looking doe-eyed at us whilst spamming our home phones recently? And Chase brands itself "New to California but not new to banking." What a relief, do you need a roadmap then? I moved my accounts to another large bank after having identity fraud wipe my accounts clean 3 times in 2008. Lew McCreary was up late pondering this post from the Harvard Business Blog, a post called Bailout Marketing -- the Wrong Way . 2:40 AM Friday May 8, 2009 by Lew McCreary Tags:Branding, Financial crisis, Marketing What sort of marketing message makes sense for the modern post-apocalyptic lending institution? Probably not this: I received a slick, expensive, 20-page brochure in the mail the other day from Bank of America, promoting its home loans and other excellent attributes. It was thick, colorful, printed on heavy (unrecycled) paper, with only a single "impact" word on several of the pages; my favorite of these was "Confiden...

A report conducted by Nora Ganim Barnes, Ph.D., and Eric Mattson CEO, Financial Insite indicates a steady rise in Fortune 500 company's use of blogging. "Each year Fortune Magazine compiles a list of America’s largest corporations. The list includes publicly and privately held companies for which revenues are publicly available. The Fortune 500 is a definitive list of the country's largest (by revenue) and most influential companies... This study examined the 2008 Fortune 500 list in an attempt to quantify the adoption of social media by identifying those with public-facing blogs." Social media = microblogging, multimedia blogging, podcasting and videoblogging, and participation in social networks like Facebook. Above image from the Neilsen Media blog . "As social media becomes more integral to the business function, we should see evidence of it in the use of blogs, podcasts, Twitter or other tools. Given that the Fortune 500 stand as a model for business succes...

Rafe Needleman is one of my favorite reporters. I wonder instead of being hated, how he manages to stay relatively well-liked. The other ironic thing is that by writing about how much they are hated, those five people must like him even more. Ah, there's the real magic. I interviewed Rafe a while back about his initiative at CNET called Webware. Some insiders at CNET tell me that it doesn't directly make money (sounded a little paranoid actually), but I would tell CNET that Webware is great for it's own brand awareness, plus it raises visibility for all those companies and software applications.

Google is hiring and here's what the ad on their web site said. "Passionate about these topics? You should work at Google. • algorithms • artificial intelligence • compiler optimization • computer architecture • computer graphics • data compression • data mining • file system design • genetic algorithms • information retrieval • machine learning • natural language processing • operating systems • profiling • robotics • text processing • user interface design • web information retrieval • and more!"

It can be said that Alan Levy is a good business man, a direct and effective negotiator. He retooled existing, large telephony infrastructure technology into a free, light-weight web service anyone with a phone can figure out. He makes money on both premium services and advertising, as well as backend US numbers procured by the phone company he also owns. But the service, again, is free. And long distance is included with virtually every phone service these days. I said "hero", because we'll all see heartbreak at some point, but few of us create a mechanism by which anyone can communicate, build community, share, connect with friends, family, paranormal psychologists, authors who write about paranormal psychologists, actors who play them on TV and activists concerned for the pet portrayals played therein. Smart businesses will take the technology, like Dave Winer did and build cool sub-services. They can use these privately like recorded conference calls, or on the fly...

Social media was made for me. I have always favored personal bonds among colleagues and more often than not found it to strengthen the work created together. I have accounts at over 30 social networking sites. I Twitter , Pownce , Jaiku , Flickr and Blip . I chat on over half a dozen instant messaging clients. I write 4 blogs and echo each of those in excerpt or comment on many other web sites. I have several feed readers and foster relationships with influencers I respect to keep up with anything I might have missed. My attention touches a lot of things and I like it that way. Some people feel that there is no intellect in the village, especially if the village is filled with idiots, but I disagree. We can learn much from this knowledge, about the variety of individual beliefs and collective views and about problem solving. So I'm a big fan, you can tell. But I want to raise a problem with social networking yet unsolved. What's missing is the ability to socially "(un)boo...

This week on BlogTalkRadio I had the opportunity to interview John Battelle. You can read up on John or read his blog, Searchblog . He offered a good discussion on information availability, social networks and what he calls "conversational media". Here's where you can listen to our talk . John spoke on the show about how interconnected social groups were becoming. So, from a chapter called The Computer and the Counterculture in the book The Cult of Information by Theodore Roszak, I pulled this quote. I believe it describes a fundamental change in individual isolation which is very powerful as most of us imagine: "Both the quantity and content of available information is set by centralized institutions -- the press, TV, radio, news services, think-tanks, government agencies, schools and universities -- which are controlled by the same interests which control the rest of the economy. By keeping information flowing from the top down, they keep us isolated from each ...

Very interesting implementation of Twittergram by Adam Green over at feedonomics . Twittergrams are short sound bytes you can point into the world of Twitter, "microbroadcasting" to your social network or community. The idea came from Dave Winer , whose band of vigilante developers continue to push media distribution as far as they can. BlogTalkRadio provides the call-in capability, which records the Twittergram or you can upload pre-recorded mp3s on the Twittergram site. The LAFD is also using BlogTalkRadio for some great civic services. You guys are on fire! ;)

My boss Alan Levy of BlogTalkRadio and I had a great time talking with Jim Turner and Tris Hussey on their new talk show today, The Mediasphere Show . Their site, http://www.blogonomics.net , discusses social media. Humble and inquisitive, these podcasters gone broadcast are a fine addition to the BlogTalkRadio network -- welcome! You can hear the show in archive here . Our discussion touched on BlogTalkRadio's role in the new media realm which was a good follow-up to the Future of Blogging panel I was on at NBC11 last week with PodTech and BlogHer. Some great questions came from the audience on community policies and supporting blogging within the enterprise. Speaking of new media, user-generated broadcasts and such...NBC11 just launched NBC11HomeTown.com , a local reader-contributed news site. Very cool. Big media steps its toe in the pool of democratized content. A lot more of this is coming as the tools to broadcast, podcast and videocast are made more available to everyday ...

If you're in the Bay Area and you haven't attended a Social Media Club event yet, this might be the one. I'll be on a panel with Elisa Camahort, Tony Bove and Jeremy Owyang discussing the future of blogging. If you missed it you can catch a slightly less than high-quality video Jeremiah took here . Ever wonder how you can use a blog? Whether you're reading them, writing them, or aggregating them, blogs are a powerful communication channel that should be part of your media mix. This panel of 3-4 blog experts looks at blogs from a number of angles. We'll cover: -> Mining the blogosphere for market intelligence -> External enterprise blogs -> Internal enterprise blogs -> Aggregating blogs -> The future of blogs Date Thursday, July 12, 2007 Time 6:00 pm PT - 8:00 pm PT Location NBC11/KNTV 2450 N. First Street San Jose, 95131 Register here if you can make it.

NYC I went to New York this week for the first time. It is a big, beautiful city filled with constant examples of the blur between consumers and businesses. This morning I interviewed Rafe Needleman of CNET's Webware on Lisacast, my weekly BlogTalkRadio talk show. I asked his views about the convergence of consumer software applications to those used in the work place. You can listen here . You can also listen to Hilary Leewong's 15-minutes of Fame show, where she interviewed me about Lisacast.

Mark Frauenfelder has a captive print and online audience most journalists would envy. But he’s not stopping there. He joins thousands of hosts and hundreds of thousands of listeners who have discovered BlogTalkRadio’s free talk show service when he appears tonight on The Alan Levy Show to discuss his upcoming book release. Levy is the founder and CEO of BlogTalkRadio . To call in to the show and speak with Alan or Mark, dial +1 (347) 677-0649. Listen live at 9 pm EST tonight or download the show from the archive after it airs. This marks a turning point in broadcast media. Blogtalkradio is empowering citizens worldwide to reach a greater audience and engage a two-way conversation – live. Frauenfelder is founder and co-editor of the Internet's most popular blog BoingBoing ( www.boingboing.net ) which boasts 350,000 readers each month and 1 million subscribers. Frauenfelder is also editor-in-chief of MAKE ( www.makezine.com ) and contributing editor to Wired.com, Madprofessor.n...

Last night I met with one of my favorite people in the industry, humble ex-physicist David Nordfors, now running the Innovation Journalism department at Stanford University. Next week marks his 4th conference on journalism here in the Bay Area. Keynoted first by Doug Engelbart, who I saw many years ago at Parc, and is speaking here about the societal collective intelligence of society, will be moderated by John Markoff. Next, by Curtis Carlson, on the discipline of innovation (insert whip sound here). Mr Carlson is the president of SRI International. Check out the rest of the speakers here , you'll even find some familiar locals. Mr. Nordfors, a best practice communication advocate aiming consistently for a program which will allow us to get more out of the event, is changing the format of this years conference slightly by extending the length of breaks and lunches. This way people can connect, which is the whole idea in the first place. As David left our meeting last night to see ...

At Netscape in 1999, I recall entering into the office one morning and being approached by reporters asking if I knew about the email scandal between the company and its competitor Microsoft. Having been briefed by a diligent human resources group, I had no comment but was well aware of its happening and the wave of damage control, present and future, it created through our organization. I think I can say that, generally speaking, can't I? Perhaps more important than the legislation which followed that event was a lesson far greater. The Web offers vast opportunities, really, it's quite fantastic. But it's rapid growth and non-standardized services are more akin to a pool of pirahnas than the relatively slow-moving frontiers we previously conquered in print, radio or TV. Regulations are enforced by priority of the greatest threat, not based on wrongdoing. The whole Internet is a unsupervised free-for-all, where the bullies and the thiefs experience virtual nirvana. There ar...

Many years ago I worked for a small multimedia company and one of our clients was Macromedia. We wrote documentation for Director 1.0, built interactive help and held trainings around the Bay Area. In my spare time, I used the software to put together a multimedia story for a family member celebrated an 80th birthday, splicing together music, pictures and narration. Sixty people gathered in a local restaurant and watched, it was very sweet. Today, most podcasters, videobloggers, journalists turned new media (and vice versa) are keen on organizations that are supporting participatory media even though there seems to be a good deal of negative press scrutinizing the business model, quality and even safety. But that's not stopping people who have to tell stories, news to share, and feelings and creativity to express. Here are three examples of people putting in the time, helping to make media higher quality and even getting paid. 1) Dan Gillmor, who I wrote about in my last post, and ...