Skip to content

Online Media

Media Ethics and Political Affiliations

  • by

Watching the Twitter streams of the newly minted gurus of Social Media, I’m often surprised by how little many of the experts actually know about traditional media. In fact, I’m surprised by how many of… 

Times To Shutter IHT Site – Forbes.com

  • by

Times To Shutter IHT Site – Forbes.com. Bad news, indeed.  I loved and regularly used the International Herald Tribune site, especially for the readspeaker implementation that allowed me to download audio versions of their stories… 

Playstation 3 + PlayOn! = Killer Home Video Setup?

I’ve had a glimpse into the future of home video and it surprisingly comes from a device I already owned, the Sony Playstation 3 (and it works on the XBox 360 as well, but I haven’t tested).  By downloading and installing a small app to my windows machine, I am now able to access online content from Hulu.com, CBS.com, Youtube.com, ESPN.com and soon, CNN.com and Netflix.

The software is PlayOn! which is currently available as a 60 day beta trial, and when released is expected to cost $30.00 when it reaches full release.  It’s made by a company called MediaMall who’s got the tantalizing mission statement: “MediaMall Technologies enables Low-Cost & Widely Available Media Services, delivered over Broadband to the Entertainment System, via the PC.”  Now how can you possibly go wrong?

The software isn’t completely perfect yet, but it still gives me a better picture than I get with my standard, non-HD cable line.  I have occassionaly had some jerky delivery, but I’ve found it I pause for a few minutes, go make some popcorn or something, and come back, whatever I’m watching runs fine.  Navigationally, I find the PS3 controller a bit challenging to use, but my 9 year old daughter is getting around like a pro.

Post Olympics Reviews from Lenovo

When a project ends, good companies do post-mortems to determine what worked, what didn’t to help them improve institutionally, while identifying possible opportunities created, and mitigating any risks exposed. Great companies do this and they do it in a way that the rest of us can benefit as well.  Such is the case of two excellent post Olympics assessments from Lenovo.

Esteban Panzeri
Esteban Panzeri

First off, I’ve got to call attention to Esteban Panzeri’ post “End of Madness Recap” from his blog, “The Challenge”.  Since I spend a lot of time in the trenches shoveling bits and bytes around, I naturally gravitate to the folks that turn the dreams into reality, and on this project, Esteban was apparently the guy.  

He comes up with an excellent list of lessons learned and among them:

  • Ideas will flow like rivers, it is execution that matters
  • One must learn to focus and discard things quickly
  • Anything can be done
  • Outsourced stuff does not always work as it should
  • Distributed content is the future

“Ideas will flow like rivers, it is execution that matters” – a line I am printing out in 72 point type to hang in my office.  Yes, indeed, ideas are important and without them, there is no innovation, but too many of us forget that at some point we need to stop talking a start doing.  Only a select few ever truly learn this lesson.

Old Media Lessons for New Media

Just because you’re new media doesn’t mean you can’t learn a few lessons from old media.  As we’re so fond of saying, new media is all about changing delivery channels of old media, hence I think it’s implied that the old school journalism rules have a place in our lives going forward.

First off, we need to think about what type of journalism we’re doing.  In almost all cases for bloggers we’ll fall into one of the following three categories:

NY Times: I Got the News Instantaneously, Oh Boy

(For our newer readers, I used to work for the premier supplier of newspaper software systems, and in the dim and distant past was a writer with the Worcester Telegram – so I still follow what’s going on in the print world quite closely)

The Sunday New York Times had a very intesting article this morning entitled “I Got the News Instantaneously, Oh Boy” which was written by Media Writer Tim Arango.  In it, Tim takes on the issue of how United Airlines had 1 Billion in market valuation disappear due to a simple error that republished an old article from 2002 on the Internet.