SocialTwister 2.0

Confessions of a Social Tools Architect

Archive for November, 2004

Seems the folks over at WikiMedia are getting more and more clever as time goes on. First there was Wikipedia, now there’s WikiNews.

Unlike Wikipedia, Wikinews will present original material rather than just compiling and summarizing information found elsewhere, according to the news site’s organizers. For future submissions, organizers also want to set up a system for accrediting Wikinews reporters who have actively participated in the project.

[…]

“The incentive for behavior in a wiki is to write in such a way that your writing can survive,” he said. “The only way it can survive is if your writing is acceptable to an extremely wide audience.”

Wired.com, “Wikipedia Creators Move Into News”

I’m troubled by WikiNews on two levels. First and foremost, there’s an outright competition, if you will, between WikiNews and the Blogosphere at large. The notion of WikiNews, as mentioned, is to provide original material as opposed to compiling “news”. Clearly, there are two Blog Entry Archetypes implicated here, the Opinion/Commentary Entry and the Thought Leadership Entry.

Already, there are millions of bloggers generating this form of original material and they are tied into an active community and distribution network. Naturally, the proverbial power law still prevents many of those voices from being heard. The implication here is that WikiNews becomes a clearinghouse for original material, the CNN of Bloggers. The primary question is at what cost it comes. See the next point.

The second issue is the community filtering of this material. I’m firmly convinced that Blogging took off as as a social phenomenon because it provided the masses with an outlet for expressing their thoughts and emotions without a filter. Fundamentally, I agree with the spirit of Wiki as it provides a unified community for reaching collective decisions. Of course, the interpretation of the events from around us is not one of the arenas that seem to benefit greatly from filtering - think Big Media. Surely many will contest that the community will act in the best interest of information; however, the community is no greater than its inherent biases.

After all, some might argue that Big Media also presents information “in such a way that your writing can survive”.

  • 16 Comments
  • Filed under: Crossover
  • Time-Shifted Commentary

    I’ve been putting a considerable amount of time and consideration into my Beercasting project. For the most part, the Beercast itself is considered to be time-shifted, however, I want to try yet another new twist to this mix: time-shifted commentary.

    One of the main issues we have with doing a real-world recording that is later downloaded is that it’s impossible to really get feedback or to react to our listeners. To try and get around this issue, I am going to list the topics (and some related links) we’re considering to discuss for feedback BEFORE we do the actual Beercast.

    We’re planning to record Tuesday evening. Comment here if you want us to hear you.

    For anyone that doesn’t want to hear Beercasting news, two small points. First, I plan on moving most of these posts to the Beercasting.com site soon. Second, I am considering a separate feed that filters them. How do you feel about these posts?

    (more…)

  • 1 Comment
  • Filed under: Beercasting
  • The Bidding of Blogging

    I received an interesting e-mail from Jeremy C. Wright this weekend describing a new auction he was running on EBay. I’ve seen posts from Jeremy over at Peter Caputa’s blog quite often so I welcomed the message.

    Apparently, Jeremy has been very busy figuring out how to leverage blogging into the business world. Several months ago I heard that he had entered negotiations to sell his blog to an unnamed (at least not one I can remember now) party. He’s back at it again.

    This time, Jeremy is amongst the first bloggers I’ve heard of to offer his services via EBay. As the auction describes:

    This auction allows you to utilize this blogger for 3 months. He will produce between 5-10 posts a week. In addition, the blogger will work with you to see what potential there is for blogging for you and your company - in effect acting as a blogging consultant for you for the period.

    If it is a fit, the blogger is happy to negotiate a deal to make the position a more permanent contract position for a reasonable fee.

    Note: I have explained my reasons for doing this more fully at my blog. Who is this blogger?

    Hire a succesful blogger to help your company’s blogging dreams become a reality.

    Source: EBay.com, “Blogger for Hire - Start or Improve Your Blog”

    So far, it seems to be working fairly well. The bidding is up to $1000 and utilizing some nice little payment features from PayPal, those payments can be spread across time even. Can this be a trend? Smart marketers will be wary of ending budgets and this is a great time to cash in on that opportunity.

    Carnegie Mellon Virtual Posters

    I heard about this experiement a few weeks ago actually and was quite interested in the possibility of systems like this. Carnegie Mellon students have crafted an interesting WiFi, Peer-to-Peer, Location-Based (had enough yet) system that allows for networking (on many levels) between students based on their movements throughout the University. As reported:

    The objective of this study was to leverage contextual information to support Semantic Web P2P scenarios. The study was conducted on Carnegie Mellon Univesity’s campus, leveragring the campus’s Wireless LAN (WLAN) and the MyCampus Semantic Web environment developed by the Mobile Commerce Laboratory over the past few years. Within this environment, users can access a variety of context-aware applications and services from PDAs over the WLAN. Examples of contextual attributes include user location (acquired through location tracking functionality running over the WLAN), calendar information, a variety of preferences (e.g. food preferences, topics of interest), weather information, social information (e.g. classmates, teachers, etc.).

    Source: InfoBridge: Peer-to-peer location-aware virtual posters

    Though these systems are intriguing in this one direction, they still are rather scary when pushed in the other direction - you know, where the system reports back on my positioning for others to see.

  • 3 Comments
  • Filed under: Crossover
  • Well we’ve done our third Beercast now. We’re happy with the results and hope you’ll send us your feedback. Download it now!. We took a departure from the Technology this week and talked a lot about Women, Men, and the stuff that happens when they interact.

    If you haven’t visited Beercasting.com yet, please do. I launched a quick new re-design. In any event, here’s the Time Index for those that are interested:

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    font-size: 75%;
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    .timeIndex tr.gray {
    background: #eee;
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    background: #fdc913;
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    border-bottom: 1px solid #eee;
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    Time Category Topic
    0:00:23   Introduction
    0:02:53   Topic Rundown
    0:05:10 WOMEN Stop Sending Mixed Signals, Will Ya?
    0:08:00 WOMEN Unintentionally Mixed Signals - Just Face It, All Men Want You
    0:09:58 WOMEN Attraction Leads To Magnetism
    0:12:25 PEOPLE If Ugly Was A Black Whole, We Could Re-Define Physics
    0:13:43 WOMEN Stop Taking Advantage of Horny Cops
    0:14:40 MEN Stop Sniffing Round Our Women
    0:15:20 MEN Please, Take My Ugly Friend
    0:16:50 WOMEN Whatever You Do, Don’t Compete With a Woman
    0:18:35 MEN The Glass Is Always Half Full
    0:19:52 WOMEN The Intentional Hack
    0:22:10 WOMEN Quit Your Complaining Cuz You Get Hit On
    0:23:40 ** Beer Change
    0:24:37 MUSIC Vibe Awards Spawn Violence
    0:26:10 SPORTS NBA Brawling
    0:30:30 SPORTS We Love Violence, Don’t We?
    0:33:30 SICK Shit As A Sporting Event (not for the faint of heart)
    0:38:50 SPORTS Damn, Did Everyone Watch Wrestling?
    0:41:25 SPORTS Smack My Bitch Up Takes On New Meaning
    0:44:55 ART Chaj Talks About the Graffiti Exhibit
    0:49:17 ART Postal Digital Art Project
    0:50:00 ** Beer change
    0:52:15 PEOPLE The Lies We Tell For The Things We Want
    0:54:44 PEOPLE Women Do It A Lot, Men Do It Longer
    0:58:38 PEOPLE Geek is Chic
    1:02:15 WOMEN Stop Splurging, Yes, Splurging
    1:03:24 TECH Is Everyone Addicted To Crackberry?
    1:04:54   ReRe Recruits New Guests
    1:05:50 ** New Guests (It Worked!)
    1:06:09 WOMEN Strange, New Women Comment On Mixed Signals
    1:08:20 WOMEN Women Say Women Have All The Power (We Agree)
    1:11:55   Shutting Down
    1:14:03 ** Beer change
    1:15:16 ** Scotty Doesn’t Know Re-Mix from EuroTrip
  • 4 Comments
  • Filed under: Beercasting
  • Knowledge vs. Experience

    Sunday night, the Chaj and I worked on our third official Beercast. It gets easier each time we do it and (we think) we’re learning more and more about what it will take to make it succeed. I still recommend everyone to try it at least once.

    One important aspect of our show, unlike traditional Podcasts, however, is the real-time involvement of total strangers. For the most part, Podcasts to date seem to mimic the radio format from start to finish. We’re doing more of a “Feet on the Street” kinda thing which brings us into contact, one way or another, with total strangers.

    Sunday, I recruited two young women sitting besides us to answer a pretty straightforward question about men, women and mixed signals. We recorded their opinions and then discussion drifted the Beercasting itself and we chatted about why we were doing it and those kinds of things. Towards the end, however, I was cornered into providing a business model by the feisty, 24-year old marketing student.

    Initially, my reaction was quick and incomplete. I decided to just write it off as an experiment, a work in progress, a living prototype - that sort of thing. I’m not sure, but I think she was laughing at us because we weren’t out to necessarily make money right off the bat - because we didn’t have a marketing plan.

    What struck me the most, and led to this post, was her assertion that nothing on the Internet happened by accident. She cited EBay, Amazon, and others as all these other big shots as proof that she was right and we were crazy. The Chaj told it to her best: “Well, you read that somewhere so we’re not gonna argue with you.” Of course, everyone out there on the Internets knows that statement is categorically wrong. Though it’s true that most experiments don’t mature into solid business models, it’s also quite evident that what starts as a simple trial can easily grow to something quite more.

    The moral of the story is that you can’t trust everything you read in books either. Sometimes it takes putting your nose to the ground to smell the rain and not just the Farmer’s Almanac’s prediction.

  • 2 Comments
  • Filed under: Crossover
  • Well, this is definitely more work than I ever expected. I wish I was feeling better this weekend to really dig in and tell a nice story, but so it goes. In any event, let’s get on with the Carnival…

    There were just too many great submissions (and GMail booted me) this week so I came up with four initial categories and stuck in whatever fit.. some things didn’t quite fit (some people just can’t color inside the lines) so hopefully they’ll get grabbed next time around. Sorry if I didn’t include you here. The categories were:

    • Government, Economics and Markets - The economy is terrible (or is it), markets are opening and closing, and government just needs a swift kick from time to time.

    • Selling and Getting Expertise - If every anything was ever sold, it was the skills of one to the needs of another. There’s no shortage of charisma, charm, and cleverness in the world and our capitalists want to tell you how to leverage it.

    • A Little of the Old, A Little of the New - Business, like history, works in cycles. We’re always seeing some old process modernized (relieving the “pain” as the VC-types like to call it). Check out some of the recent happenings and ponderings as these two forces collide.

    • New Business Opportunities - Those zany entrepreneurs. They’re always coming up with the darnedest things and this week is no different than any other.

    Government, Economics and Markets

    Joe Kristan from Roth & Company scrutinizes the coming of the flat tax:

    “Will any of this pass? Some are sceptical that the administration will be able to pull off both social security reform and tax reform. We think there is a good chance of significant tax reform. When the President sets his mind to something, he keeps at it until gets his way. Just ask Saddam Hussein.”

    Rawdon Adams of Capital Chronicles wonders about Greenspan and the bottom:

    “might this evolution of Chairman Greenspan’s current account rhetoric mark a step towards fulfillment of the Large Bottom Law? In other words, now that even America’s Central Banker has tossed fodder to dollar bears, there will be yet more folks on the already crowded sell-side of dollar trades.”

    Random Roger chimes in as well on this matter and starts talking about the weak dollar:

    “Neither of them said anything new, but that it came from Greenspan so bluntly was not everyday stuff. There are real problems confronting the dollar, the bond market and the stock market. What I think might happen is that the dollar may regain some of the ground lost this week, but I don’t think a correction will change the trend. The twin deficits are likely to continue to send the dollar lower but with less violence than we saw this week.”

    Anita Campell puts on her SBO hat and wonders what that weakened dollar means for the small players (simple answer is it depends):

    “I could name a dozen different scenarios that make the weak dollar good for one small business or bad for another. One thing, though, is clear. In this increasingly global world of commerce, no country is an island. And no business operates on a single island. The traditional wisdom about currency valuations and who it helps and who it hurts is not such a cut-and-dried proposition anymore.”

    Mike Pechar, The Interested Participant, warns that consolidation is not always the optimal solution (we’ve all got old habits and biases — and government’s got even more):

    “From an organizational and business perspective, consolidation of management functions among three facilities is a good idea but it won’t be welcomed by many. In particular, those that will no longer be needed.

    […]

    All that said, it can’t be overlooked that President Leidich is trying to implement dramatic changes to a sloth-like bureaucracy which will impact many people’s lives. Hopefully, the consolidation can be completed with employee discontent kept as low as reasonably achievable.”

    David Jackson ponders on the impact of new Gold Exchanges (maybe it’s just Fool’s Gold):

    “Gold is only worth what investors are prepared to pay for it, unlike other commodities whose demand is largely determined by consumption. If the price of gold begins to fall and is expected to continue falling, there’s no reason for most people (excluding jewelers) to buy gold.

    In that respect, investing in precious metals is fundamentally riskier than investing in stocks or industrial commodities. And that’s one reason why some people may consider gold to be an asset class unworthy of inclusion in investment portfolios.”

    Lastly, Brian Gongol thinks the government just doesn’t know when to stop:

    “What the Secretary misses is that a free society involves choices — the choice to work in a smoking or non-smoking environment. The choice to eat in a smoking or non-smoking restaurant. The choice to associate with smokers or non-smokers in the bars. A pub chain spokesperson says, “The majority of people don’t like to be around smoky areas. We think it will bring a lot more people back into pubs long-term.” If they really believed that, they’d offer non-smoking pubs. Smoking bans don’t seem to have much impact on revenues in either direction.

    Smoking is a filthy, disgusting habit. But it shouldn’t be an excuse to make people more comfortable with government intrusions in their lives. Smoking ban proposals are everywhere, not just in England.”

    Selling and Getting Expertise

    Torsten (TJ’s Blog) admires David Teten’s Circle of Experts:

    “There have been quite some trials to start such a knowledge marketplace. Even Pierre Omidiyar is according to people familiar with the matter still on the lookout for a working model. Circle of Experts has already built up a considerable database of experts all over the world. But the trick is NitronAdvisors pays out up to $250 per consulting hour. This is a major difference to all the lay marketplaces where the incentive for real experts is pretty slim.”

    Phillip B. Wilson recommends Peter Block’s book:

    “In most companies today if you are a supervisor or a manager you spend the
    vast majority, if not all of your time, consulting. To be a great (or in
    Peter Block’s term a “flawless”) consultant, you must create and maintain
    authentic relationships. From authentic relationships spring realistic
    expectations, actual commitment, and supporting behaviors. It confronts and
    therefore eliminates many of the negative, back-biting and undermining
    behaviors so common in organizations.”

    Evelyn Rodriguez from the CrossRoads Dispatches hopes we can look inside to grow our abilities:

    Leaving corporate America and consulting I found wasn’t the silver bullet. Yes, I have much more autonomy around my creative cycles but ultimately it gets frustrating to hear: “Yes, but.” Usually, “Yes, but that will never work here” time after time after time. And you know with that attitude it truly won’t ever work there. Those pitches weren’t even my very best ideas as I was well aware of the confines of the box I was given. So having autonomy over your creative cycles ultimately isn’t sufficient. A lot of consultants might be quite happy with collecting the fees for advice that falls flat and concepts that go nowhere, but it’s not working for me.

    Of course, I’m wondering “Why Be An Expert, When You Can Be A Radio Star?”

    As we searched for our own outlet, we quickly realized that some of the funniest and best stuff we were talking about happened when we were out having drinks. We weren’t sure, but we figured there were some people who might laugh at with us, so we started to record it.

    A Little of the Old, A Little of the New

    Dave Foster takes to the docks and wonders if river-based shipping is on the move (it’s got sea legs):

    “The tradeoff, of course, is between cost and speed. To get freight by truck from New Orleans to Memphis will cost you about $40/ton and take 8 hours; by barge it will cost about $6/ton and take 3 days. Osprey is betting that there will be a significant set of customers for which the tradeoff makes sense. One exaple is coffee importers, who can easily transfer their cargoes from ship to barge. And a logistics expert at Georgia Tech thinks the biggest application of river-based container freight will be in returning empty containers to their point of origin.”

    Jay looks favorably on the merger of Sears and K-mart (S-mart?):

    “It will be fascinating to watch the S-Mart, Sears Mart, K-Sears, or whatever you want to call it, saga unfold. They’ll have the leverage of size. They’ll have a certain buzz, temporarily, from the very news of the merger. The market certainly loved it initially. Stock going up 17% or 21% doesn’t happen every day.”

    James from the Rednersville Loyalist writes about how antique dealers are getting support and sales from the 21st century:

    “All too often, antique dealers operate their businesses much the same as retailers did when their products were brand new.

    The Rednersville Country Store serves customers in the local community in a real, bricks and mortar, antique shop that is authentic. Some things never change around these parts; folks like it that way.

    […]

    At the same time, it’s now just as important to reach out and connect with new customers, in faraway places, who are using the power of the internet to locate specific collectibles in places they couldn’t possibly visit, except online.”

    Les Jones reminds us just how far customer service has departed from its homely beginnings (bad e-commerce, bad):

    “MSNBC has a story about retailers tracking returns and denying what they feel are excess returns.

    I ran into something like this about five years ago when I started remodeling my house. I learned that Home Depot didn’t require receipts, so I stopped bothering to even look for the receipt when I returned something. Home Depot eventually flagged my account and told me that from then on I could only get store credit for returns without the receipt. Result: I started looking for my receipts when I took things back to Home Depot. They had disabused me of a bad habit they themselves had taught me.”

    New Business Opportunities

    Wayne Hurlbert says you can sure bet that Blogs Sell Books:

    “Blogs sell blooks.

    Lots of books.

    That’s now a proven fact of the publishing world.

    Even better, is the fact that blogs sell books that are self published, by print on demand publishers.

    The combination of those two phenomona are transforming forward thinking bloggers into successful published authors.”

    Russel Buckley sees the writing on the wall, well almost:

    “I can see this kind of thing taking off - a kind of virtual graffiti, which you only need to switch on and read/listen to it if you’re interested in it. This leaves the environment free and uncluttered for everyone else.

    We’ve seen similar things at the Yellow Arrow project, World Board and TagandScan and while they’re all pretty crude at the moment, I think we could be seeing something quite powerful in its early stages.

    While there are major issues to overcome - mainly who creates, edits and maintains content - I think we will find a way through. If Wikipedia has proved workable and generally reliable, this kind of virtual re-interpretation of the project must be possible.”

    Warren “Coyote” Meyer talks about the growing community of American Nomads and the challenges and opportunities they face:

    “Some of these new nomads are able to completely retire and live off their savings. Others need to work to bring in a bit of cash, or at least to pay for a place to park and hook up their RV to utilities. In our business, we hire over 400 of these folks a year, usually working the summer months in exchange for a free site for the RV and some money for relaxing in the winter. RVers are generally comfortable with fairly modest pay, but they won’t stand still for very long if they don’t like the job or their boss or their co-workers. After all, they all have wheels on their houses and can leave with little notice.”

    And last, but certainly not least we have Brendon Connelly, The Slacker Manager. Brendon leaves us with a bunch of notes and links on how to “Get Things Done” which is just what I need to be doing now.

    It’s been fun!

  • 3 Comments
  • Filed under: Blogging
  • OK. So the experiemental phase is over (download it here). I tried a BeerCast with some of my friends a few days ago and though the content was good the sound quality was for shit. A few nights ago, however, we made a switch to using MiniDisc to do the recording and the results were nothing short of phenomenal. More importantly, however, was the involvement of the passive audience.

    When you BeerCast, you do it in a public environment and its inevitable that someone is going to sit next to you. This happened tonight while Chaj and I were speaking. We actually ran out of juice and needed new batteries. So as he ran across the street, I realized that we might have been loud so I explained to our neighbors what we were doing. Suddenly, there was a new excitement to deal with. It was immediately obvious that we needed to involve these nice folks and so the first guests were invited in.

    Chaj and I have been mentally sparring on how long one of the BeerCasts should be. So far, we’ve managed to not go any less than 1:30:00 (an hour and thirty minutes for you out there). This reminds me of that Mark Twain saying, “I started to write you a short letter, but I wrote you a long one instead”. The insight being that it’s 1) hard to be concise and 2) almost unnatural.

    I am of firm belief that if you’ve listened an hour, you won’t care how much longer it goes since obviously there’s a conversation at work and you would hate to not know the ending. I could be wrong.

    In any event, we went from us 2 to 5 and the conversation only got better. We’ve already got 2 new guests planned for the next show and hope to make it the unspoken rule for all shows going forward.

    I hope you’ll be able to tolerate it all.. and if not, tell me when we should have stopped. We’re DESPERATE for feedback.

    beercast.logo.gif
    Show The re:chaj Show
    Date November 11, 2004
    Location Ariba Ariba
    Hosts
    • ReRe
    • Chaj
    Download reChaj_11_16_2004.mp3
    0:00:00 INTRO Introduction and Rules
    0:01:02 INTRO Topic Rundown
    0:02:27 TECH The B Word
    0:05:35 TECH It’s Content Management Dammit!
    0:10:50 TECH CBS - Blogs are CB Radios
    0:11:40 TECH Be The Human Filter
    0:15:05 TECH MBA Students Don’t Do Blogging
    0:15:45 TECH Does Blogging Breed Honesty?
    0:18:30 TECH Vanity and Money - Sugar and Spice
    0:19:35 TECH How Do You Measure Blog Success
    0:21:10 TECH Show the Love, Give Some Comments
    0:22:30 ** Beer Change
    0:23:10 TECH Photobloggers are Linkwhores
    0:25:25 TECH How Do You Measure Your Audience?
    0:27:39 TECH Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words, Writers Prepare To Earn
    0:30:00 TECH The Bigger The Post…
    0:31:29 TECH Photoblogs and Trackback
    0:32:35 TECH Chaj Is A Genius
    0:34:00 TECH How Trackback Works
    0:35:41 NEWS Bush Cabinet Emptying Out
    0:37:40 NEWS Powell / Arnold / Rudy For President
    0:39:25 NEWS What’s Up With That Giulliani Guy?
    0:42:44 NEWS Is America Ready For A Black President? A Woman President?
    0:45:34 NEWS Bush Was More African-American Friendly
    0:48:00 NEWS Politicians Are Highly Atypical People
    0:50:25 NEWS ReRe Doesn’t Trust Warriors
    0:52:15 NEWS Small Business Represent
    0:53:47 ** Batteries Died
    0:54:13 ** New Guests Added
    0:54:50 NEWS Giulliani Was Opportunistic
    0:56:35 NEWS Cabinet Redux - Politics Of Leaving
    0:58:40 NEWS Next Election - Lots of Issues, How About Being Qualified?
    1:01:00 NEWS Presidential What Ifs
    1:02:20 NEWS Back To That Qualification Thing
    1:05:00 NEWS Why Are We In Iraq?
    1:06:12 NEWS Merging Church and State
    1:07:36 ** Beer Change
    1:09:10 SOCIETY (Extreme) Christianity
    1:12:23 ** Signing Off
  • 0 Comments
  • Filed under: Beercasting
  • OK. So I completely forgot that I am hosting the Carnival of the Capitalists next week (hey, I signed up to host it like 6 months ago). Thank goodness I’m a LinkWhore and was busy searching Technorati when I saw a reference to me hosting it or I wouldn’t have known :)

    So what is the Carnival of the Capitalists?

    Will you link anything submitted?

    It will be up to the discretion of the host each week whether to link each submission, how or whether to categorize, organize, describe and display them. A post may be omitted for any or no reason.

    May I submit more than one entry, or posts from other blogs?

    You can only submit one post. Yes some bloggers write better, some write more often, but for now we are limiting each blog to one post. You can submit a post from another blog if you really like it, but if that blogger submits his/her own post and it is different from your submission, we will choose the latter. We all have posts from time to time that we think are really good but, for whatever reason, don’t get much response. This is your chance to pick that one favorite post of yours and put it in front of a larger audience.

    When do I make a submission?

    The official publication date for Carnival of the Capitalists is each Monday, starting October 13, 2003. The host may post it any time during the weekend up into Monday morning. Thus you would want to submit entries by early Saturday afternoon for the official cutoff. At the host’s discretion, that may be extended. The hosts may post specific deadline and guidelines for their week.

    Where do I make a submission?

    Check the site of the host for the week in question for an e-mail address, or send to:

    capitalists -at- elhide.com or greg -at- socialtwister.com

    That address will automatically forward to the new host, starting sometime each Monday.

    So send me those submissions, and send them quick! Once again: greg at socialtwister dot com.

  • 3 Comments
  • Filed under: Blogging
  • Another Fire: Queen of Sky Downed

    There’s another victim to the corporate blog grinder. This time, it’s an attractive young lady that formerly was working as a flight attendant for Delta. Ellen Simonetti, also known as the Queen of Sky, was let go a few days ago for posting some questionably racy photos to her “Diary of a Fired Flight Attendant” blog.

    It should be noted that she made her best effort to hide the name of the company she worked for, using an alias instead. Here’s some coverage on the matter:

    But it is Simonetti’s very 21st-century activities that she says prompted Delta management to ground her, suspending her from flying in September and then firing her a month later.

    Simonetti has operated a Web log since January, calling it Diary of a Flight Attendant, and said she did not hear from Delta about the site until after she posted a set of provocative photos of herself in her Delta uniform.

    In one photograph, her skirt is hiked to mid-thigh as she perches along a seatback on an empty airliner. In another, she is leaning over the seats, her blouse unbuttoned, exposing part of her bra. Simonetti said she posted those photographs because she thought they made her look pretty.

    Source: News.com, “Blog backfires for flight attendant”

    Though this is probably more of a case for consideration than say reporting on Macs being delivered to Microsoft, but still it’s an important issue for lots of you people that work for other (I’m still immune from what I understand).