Becker’s Online Journal

"We don't want to create an army of spammers, and we are not trying to turn Facebook and Twitter into one giant spam network," said Joey Caroni, co-founder of Peer2. "All we are trying to do is get consumers to become marketers for us."

From Brad Stone's article in the New York Times, looking at how marketers are trying to overcome ad saturation and inject messages into the conversations people are having on their social networks. The idea is that, rather than just automatically ignoring the ads, people might trust ads that come from their friends.

And his name is Scott Adams. Hard to blame him, though. Newspapers are his meal ticket.

Once upon a time, conference goers could do little more than passively fork their cheesecake when a snooze-inducing keynote speaker took the podium. No longer. The microblogging service Twitter is changing a staple of academic life from a one-way presentation into a real-time conversation. Flub a talk badly enough and you now risk mobilizing a scrum of digital-spitball-slinging snark-masters.

(Via the Chronicle of Higher Education)

There is plenty of reason to criticize Malcolm Gladwell, but you get the sense that his chief flaw is being popular.

(Via Columbia Journalism Review)

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales spoke with Poynter about the Associated Press's plan to produce some sort of topics pages for news. This comment from Wales stuck out to me.

People do often come to Wikipedia when major news is breaking. This is not our primary intention, but of course it happens. The reason that it happens is that the traditional news organizations are not doing a good job of filling people in on background information. People come to us because we do a better job at meeting their informational needs.

Wales basically says that the AP should have figured out topic pages years ago to give people background information on the news of the day. They didn't, and now Wikipedia tops most search results because the online encyclopedia provides context that the AP doesn't.

After the deaths of billions, interest in the fates of the Curtis family ... becomes laughable. Their narrow, sometimes belabored escapes carry less and less emotion -- the audience knows they, themselves, are among the imagined dead.

I just dug through the actual, dead-tree clip archives for 1995 to find an article for a woman that wasn't available online. It deals with inspection work done on the foundation of Sacajawea Middle School, back when the building was first being put up.

I'm not sure why she needed the article. I don't suspect that digging that far into the past for a specific newspaper article can be good, especially when the people and companies are still around today.

For what it's worth, I've tacked on the article.

Click here to download:

Expensive Assurance.pdf (887 KB)