My colleague David Meerman Scott just posted one of the coolest projects I think he’s done: a video in which he hopes to demonstrate the power of and principles for creating what he calls a World Wide Rave by starting one around his new book of same name. I do editorial work for David and was involved in both the book (available from Wiley on March 3) and the new e-book (in which he explains how he put the video together), and I highly recommend that anyone interested in raising the online profile of his or her organization have a look at what he’s put together. Watch carefully during the first few seconds!
Category: Web Video
Sunday Judgment VI
A couple of years ago, my one-a-day usage errors calendar (yes, I had one) went off mission for a page to tackle a pronunciation issue. I’ll take that as license to do likewise. To be honest, though, I think the author and an awful lot of other people make too big a deal about this particular mistake.
Who cares if people say “nucular” instead of “nuclear”?
Aren’t there tons of other words that get mispronounced all the time that no one cares about? Why do we reserve special condemnation for this one in particular? Hell, I’ve heard professors and industry professionals say “nucular.” I dislike George Bush as much as the next guy, and I agree that no one’s going to confuse him with George Plimpton, but can we just let it go?
Turns out I’m not the only one who’s thought about this. And, actually, the “army of coal-powered zombie dolphins” bit notwithstanding, I think this video might be on to something regarding what quite probably is a rhetorical move on Bush’s part:
In other nuclear news, my old friend Ryan Hagen just sent me a link to a video he came across. He sums it up pretty well: “It’s not even really fair to say it’s an intellectually lazy guide, because it’s on a whole different planet–but it’s an interesting look into the way nuclear energy continues to be perceived.” The subject of the video? “Hunting the Radioactive Beasts of Chernobyl,” apparently.
I won’t insult your intelligence by discussing what’s wrong with it, although I’ll share that my favorite line was “This is what happens when we play with technology we don’t understand.” You can say that again.
Warning: This video contains foul language. Like, a lot of it. And also booze.
The Hacker Within: Baseball Edition
With a little help from geek and proud, I’m now able to listen to MLB.TV radio broadcast streams on Kermit, the Linux machine I work at. Using the MediaPlayerConnectivity plug-in Alan suggests and choosing Totem as the default player in the configuration wizard seems to do the trick on my system (“i686-redhat-linux-gnu” according to configure).
I couldn’t get the video to work, though. I don’t view much MLB.TV video at work anyway, so you’d think I’d have been able to leave it at that. I couldn’t. I spent much of the afternoon reading up on Silverlight and Moonlight, GStreamer and Pitdll. I battled with autotools and Mono distributions. I was defeated. Hopefully the Moonlight people get a Firefox plug-in finished soon. They’re working pretty hard, from the sound of it.
Speaking of computing in the name of baseball, stay tuned for a report on draft.gms, my network flow model that will hopefully let GAMS choose my fantasy baseball draft picks. I think I can do it as a modified assignment problem with the help of little tuning trick I learned about in a breast cancer diagnosis project I learned about in linear programming last semester. I’m sure you’re on the edge of your seat.
Point of Contention
Is The Tipping Point‘s central tenet–that “‘social epidemics’ are ‘driven by the efforts of a handful of exceptional people'”–correct? Some networks theorists writing in Journal of Consumer Research don’t think so.
I won’t start my “Network Flows” class until the end of the month, but I think these guys’ central point makes sense:
Dodds compares the spread of ideas to the spread of a forest fire. When a fire turns into a conflagration, no one says that it was because the spark that began it was so potent. ‘If it had been raining,’ Dodds says, ‘that same match wouldn’t have had an effect.’ Instead, a fire takes off because of the properties of the larger forest environment: the dryness, the density, the wind, the temperature.
In other words, they’re claiming that it’s better to find a way to reach “a critical mass of easily influenced individuals” rather than a few “exceptional people”.
This is disappointing news, if you ask me. I’d rather hear about trends from well spoken experts than a gang of easily influenced chumps.
In other news, it turns out I’m not the only one who watches video on his lunch break. Then again, I’m in grad school, so I do plenty of non-lunch-hour video watching as well. You try sitting at a desk 12-14 hours a day debugging code without a few Power Thirst breaks. Unacceptable!