Perlmutter Interviewed about “Online Religion Quizzes”
I was interviewed for an article in the Lawrence Journal World on “Online religion quizzes.”
Originally posted August 18, 2008 at PolicyByBlog...
New Media and Politics
The Obama for America campaign tried something new to achieve an old goal: sign up and you would get a text message on Saturday morning (apparently very early Saturday morning) announcing his choice for VP. It's a novel idea, and a clever one. Yes, getting a text message from Barack Obama--or at least from his campaign--is exciting. A recipient can feel engaged, however superficially. But the Obama campaign got something in return: millions of contacts. Contacts donate time, money, and word-of-mouth support. It's worth discussing if this is a trick that will work next time.
Meanwhile, Joe Biden sent an email with an embedded video to those contacts over the weekend (make sure you have the proper plug-ins). CNN and iReport have teamed up with Digg to get viewers' questions answered by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA). All of these tactics are innovative and reflective of the new ways people communicate. But are we missing the bigger slice of the interested...
Citizen Journalism Workshop: BlogWorld & New Media Expo 2008
If you are a blogger, hope to see you in Vegas! I am helping organize the workshop below.
Citizen Journalism Workshop
An Exclusive Event at BlogWorld & New Media Expo 2008
Date : Sept. 19, 2008 – 10:00AM – 4:45PM
Location : Las Vegas Convention Ctr.
PROGRAM OVERVIEW :
As blogs take their place as legitimate and respected sources for news, information and analysis, BLOGWORLD & NEW MEDIA EXPO 2008 introduces a new Citizen Journalism Workshop.
There are about 112 millions weblogs worldwide, and while many are blogging for casual reasons or for just a short time, others, especially news and information bloggers, are serious about their blogs' success in the greater marketplace of ideas.
How can someone "break in" as a news, politics or current events blogger and build a readership, get attention from major bloggers and mass media, and more important perhaps, affect or influence the traditional press agenda, politics, and public opinion?
Traditional news media outlets and bloggers have not always had the best...
David Perlmutter Interviewed by Care2
I was interviewed by Care2, a company that provides online outreach for nonprofits.
David Perlmutter Talks Blogs, Interactors, and Jon Stewart
David Perlmutter, author of the new book Blog Wars, is a professor at the University of Kansas School of Journalism & Mass Communications. Perlmutter, who was a recent guest on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, sat down in Washington in early August for an interview with Care2’s Clint O’Brien to talk about how blogging is reshaping media and changing the way citizens think about politics and social causes.
Clint O'Brien: What inspired you to write this book?
David Perlmutter: Blog Wars began as an idea as early as the mid-90s. In 1996 a friend and I did a study of presidential campaign websites. Basically, what we found was that they were pretty much static bulletin boards: speeches, statements, pictures just posted up there. No real interactivity. At the same time, I had been writing a lot on new communication technologies...
Digg Being Dugg — By Some
As I mentioned here a few weeks ago, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) answered questions on a Digg Dialogg, a joint project between Digg and CNN’s iReport. Digg users gave the thumbs-up-or down to submitted questions, just like a regular Digg article submission, meaning that the most “dugg” questions were asked. Of course, as MediaShift’s Simon Owens points out, the more Digg users engage in politics, the more apparent it becomes that conservative articles and issues are not being, well, dugg. Why? It’s possible that the most vocal Digg users liberal tendency was mirrored in the two conventions: a younger crowd, more tech-savvy, lit up the Democratic convention with text messages and interactive maps. The Republican convention was more technologically low-key, relying instead on a loyal base. It isn’t that Republicans, by and large, don’t buy into new media, but perhaps they don’t need to. So why would they dig Digg in the same way tech-savvy liberals do? This doesn't...
Paleolithic Blogs
Dave (askdavetaylor) Taylor gave the Keynote address of the Executive & Entrepreneur track at the Blogworld & New Media Expo 2008 in Las Vegas. (I am here as track director for the Citizen Journalism Workshop). Mr. Taylor made the comment that from the very beginning media--such as early cave paintings--has been biased in that it reflected what the creators wanted to show and not what they did not want to show.
Interestingly I discussed this point in my book Visions of War (St. Martin's, 1999) which looked at the history of pictures of war. I noted that cave paintings, like those at Lascaux, France were the first physical "medium" of communications outside of the human body. They date back to the appearance of us--anatomically modern humans--and flourished during the Upper Paleolithic (Old Stone Age) era about 35,000 to 12,000 years. Interestingly, when researchers have counted the scenes, flora, and fauna represented in the images on caves you see a huge "bias."...
A Slow (or Bright) Blog Manifesto
It ought also to be said that he was immensely painstaking. [When he made] Broad and powerful statements...they were no mere assertions, but the product of countless hours of research into the minutiae of the subject. Even by the usual scrupulous standards of comparative philology, Tolkien was extraordinary in this respect. His concern for accuracy cannot be overemphasized, and it was doubly valuable because it was coupled with a flair for detecting patterns and relations. 'Detecting' is a good word, for it is not too great a flight of fancy to picture him as a linguistic Sherlock Holmes, presenting himself with an apparently disconnected series of facts and deducing from them the truth about some major matter. He also demonstrated his ability to 'detect' on a simpler level, for when discussing a word or phrase with a pupil he would cite a wide range of comparable forms and expressions in other languages.*
I have been thinking lately about these words written...
Mars Lander: Death Blog
Computerworld reports the last post of NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander: "So long, Earth. I'll be here to greet the next explorers to arrive, be they robot or human."
You wonder what 2001's HAL would have put in his Twitter tweets and blog posts. "I've just picked up a fault in the AE-35 unit"?
Originally posted November 11, 2008 at PolicyByBlog...
Perlmutter Dept. of State Talks: Manila & Kabul
Some other blogging and elections talks:
--David D. Perlmutter. International webtalk on "The American Elections and Online Social-Interactive Media" sponsored by the U.S. Department of State and the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, November 3, 2008.
Read: The transcript of the webchat.
--David D. Perlmutter. Keynote Speaker. "The American elections." Tele-Video Conference sponsored by by the U.S. Department of State and the U.S. Embassy in Manila, Philippines, October 21, 2008.
Originally posted November 18, 2008 at PolicyByBlog...
Obama: Advised by cabinet members…and millions online
A few days before the Nov. 4 election, PRWeek asked communications professionals who would win the race for the White House: Those polled predicted an Obama victory, saying the campaign's social media tactics and remarkable fundraising efforts would contribute to an electoral edge.
Barack Obama won the presidency in a 53-46 victory over John McCain, with many – both the mainstream media and political bloggers – attributing the win to the factors predicted by those solicited in the PRWeek poll.
Pollster Jeff Booms says the Obama win indicates a broad move to interactive communications as opposed to conventional, Independent/center-appeal strategy – a tactic unsuccessfully employed by the McCain campaign.
The online strategy continues post-election win: Obama has a Web site,change.gov, for his transition to the White House. On change.gov, you can follow Obama headlines, blog in the virtual newsroom, learn about his cabinet and the inauguration, and get in-depth details about the Obama-Biden agenda on a variety of topics – e.g., the economy, Iraq and taxes.
On each of these Web pages, a blue box displays in the center...