Texting While Driving
I watched a news story on The NBC Nightly News regarding the danger of texting and driving. In the news story portions of this video were shown; it is powerful.
Alternate Reality Games
This weekend while engaged in quite a bit of driving, I listened to the July 16 episode of The Maccast featuring J. C. Hutchins. The topic of conversation focused on Alternate Reality Games, a massive media genre that encompasses a broad assortment of communication methods to engage people in the topic of the ARG. The entire infrastructure is built around the web, so it becomes geographically dispersed as the game takes on a life of its own.
Wikipedia provides a more in-depth definition:
An alternate reality game (ARG), is an interactive narrative that uses the real world as a platform, often involving multiple media and game elements, to tell a story that may be affected by participants' ideas or actions.
The form is defined by intense player involvement with a story that takes place in real-time and evolves according to participants' responses, and characters that are actively controlled by the game's designers, as opposed to being controlled by artificial intelligence as in a computer or console video game. Players interact directly with characters in the game, solve plot-based challenges and puzzles, and often work together with a community to analyze the story and coordinate real-life and online activities. ARGs generally use multimedia, such as telephones, email and mail but rely on the Internet as the central binding medium.
ARGs are growing in popularity, with new games appearing regularly and an increasing amount of experimentation with new models and subgenres. They tend to be free to play, with costs absorbed either through supporting products (e.g. collectible puzzle cards fund Perplex City) or through promotional relationships with existing products (for example, I Love Bees was a promotion for Halo 2, and the Lost Experience and FIND815 promoted the television show Lost). However, pay-to-play models are not unheard of.
Imagine how something like this could be used in an educational setting. It would be a project of great undertaking, but it would certainly engage today’s younger learners.
To read more about ARGs, explore the following resources:
- The Complete Wikipedia article on ARGs
- A Wikipedia article describing “The Lost Experience,” an ARG created to promote the television show Lost.
- Personal Effects: Dark Art (a novel by Hutchins with an accompanying ARG)
- J.C. Hutchins’ web site
- The July 16 episode of The Maccast
CNN Acquires Leading Twitter Account
Steve Musil (Webware.com)
CNN gained nearly a million Twitter followers on Wednesday when it acquired the @cnnbrk Twitter account.
The account, the largest on Twitter with more than 947,000 followers, had been maintained and nurtured by James Cox. CNN did not disclose financial details of the acquisition, probably because rules at the microblogging site prohibit the selling of Twitter accounts.
The acquisition comes as the race to 1 million Twitter followers heats up. As of Wednesday afternoon, Ashton Kutcher was in second place with 917,000 followers, followed closely by Britney Spears, who has about 913,000 followers.
Kutcher publicly challenged CNN to a race to 1 million users on Tuesday in a video posted to Qik.com.
"I found it astonishing that one person can actually have as big of a voice online as what an entire media company can on Twitter," Kutcher said. "And so I just thought that was just kind of an amazing comment on the state of our media, and I said that, if I beat CNN to 1 million viewers, then I would ding-dong ditch Ted Turner--because I don't think it's gonna happen."
CNN accepted Kutcher's challenge Tuesday on the "Larry King Show."
Kutcher, who is best known as star of TV's "That '70s Show" and husband of actress Demi Moore, has said he will donate 10,000 mosquito bed nets to charity for World Malaria Day if he is first to 1 million followers.
Meanwhile, game publisher Electronic Arts is getting in on the action, promising to put Kutcher's 1 millionth follower in a future EA game and give that person a copy of every game EA produces in 2009--but only if Kutcher beats CNN to the million-follower mark.
Churches and “The Big Game” Copyright Issues
Photo Source: The Christian Post.
Every year, churches across the USA face huge competition from an event that has become known as the Super Bowl. In fact, as National Public Radio commentator Frank Deford observed in a piece called “A Merry Super Bowl To All, And To All A Good Game”:
Like Halloween and Valentine's Day, Super Sunday isn't an official paid holiday, but let's face it, it's become as much an accepted part of the modern American calendar as President's Day or Memorial Day…And at the end of the day, I'd suggest that Super Sunday is actually much more Father's Day than is Father's Day itself. Why don't we just combine the two and send out cards to Daddy now?
Rather than fight the growing interest in Big Game, churches started taking an “if you can’t beat them, join them” attitude. In fact, as more and more churches installed video projection equipment, Big Game Sunday became a big draw for local churches. That was until two years ago.
In 2007, the National Football League decided to crack down on Indianapolis area churches who held Super Bowl Parties in honor of their home-town Colts.
Last year, the NFL went out of its way to alert churches that showing the Big Game on anything larger than a 55-inch screen was indeed a copyright violation, and that if churches violated the NFL’s copyright, they may face legal consequences. [See NFL Pulls Plug On Big-Screen Church Parties for Super Bowl, by Jacqueline L. Salmon, The Washington Post, Feb. 1, 2008.]
Obviously, no one was happy with this turn of events. Churches found themselves once again in direct competition with the Big Game, and for its part, the NFL came out looking like a money-hungry bully unwilling to play with Mainstreet America.
Last year, all of the legal threats and ambiguity put a chill on the entire event. It was like dumping a five-gallon bucket of Gatorade down the backs of America’s churches. No one knew what to do.
After the game was over, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell softened the NFL’s stance and brought clarity to the issue. In a letter to Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), Goodell stated, “The League would not object to live showings of the Super Bowl by religious organizations, regardless of screen size, as long as the viewings are free and are on premises that the church uses on a routine and customary basis.” The NFL stated its intention to implement the policy starting with this year’s Super Bowl. [Source: Television Broadcast cited in “The NFL Goes to Church.”]
So, as you prepare for the Big Weekend featuring The Big Game on The Big Day, make sure you don’t mention the name of The Big Game in any of your promotions. Beyond that, may you have a blessed Big Day and enjoy the Big Game.
Old Line Journalism Dying One Tweet at a Time
Today demonstrates well why old line print journalism involving large, corporately-owned media conglomerates is a dying breed.
In today's Des Moines Register, publisher Laura Hollingsworth describes the economic woes facing the newspaper:
Like all Iowans, we’ve already had a few months of tough decisions. We’ve dealt with a reduction in employees and a furlough program in hopes to avoid further layoffs in this volatile first quarter. We’re making tough, but necessary decisions. Some decisions have us setting aside what we want to do for what we need to do. Some simply accelerate what we were already planning, like increasing and expanding our digital content to meet the growing demand for it.
Starting on Monday, you will see some changes in the layout of The Des Moines Register. The headline is that we’ll be merging some sections and moving some features.
The bottom line is, of course, well, the bottom line. Newspapers like The Des Moines Register are losing subscribers (and advertisers) by the thousands. After all, who wants to pay for a subscription to a newspaper when you can read the same articles online 24/7?
Meanwhile, news organizations across the net are describing growing importance and power of microblogging services like Twitter.
The most recent illustration is the crash landing of US Airways flight 1549 in the Hudson River. The first tweets started hitting the Net only seconds following the crash. As MSNBC reports:
“There’s a plane in the Hudson. I’m on the ferry going to pick up the people.”
Those words, hastily typed on Janis Krums’ iPhone just after US Airways flight 1549 crashed into the Hudson River on Thursday, marked yet another milestone in the microblogging revolution. Krums, a Sarasota, Fla., entrepreneur, posted his observations and a compelling photo of a half-submerged aircraft to Twitter, where it was seen by hundreds of people before any other media organization knew about the accident.
Red Ink Replacing Printer's Ink
In an Associated Press article reporting on the bankruptcy of The Minneapolis Star Tribute, writer Jeff Baenen describes what is happening within the newspaper industry:
The Star Tribune ranked as the nation's 15th-largest paper last October, with weekday circulation of about 322,000 and Sunday circulation of almost 521,000. The paper has nearly 1,400 employees.
The Star Tribune filing is the latest sign of the struggles facing the newspaper industry, which is coping with a deadly combination of high debt and declining advertising revenue amid a deep economic downturn.
In December, Tribune Co., which owns the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, The (Baltimore) Sun, The Hartford Courant and other dailies, as well as 23 television stations and the Chicago Cubs baseball team, was forced to seek bankruptcy protection because of dwindling advertising revenues.
USA Today publisher Gannett Co. this week imposed one-week, unpaid furloughs for most U.S. employees. The Seattle Times has asked some employees to take a week off, and others have frozen wages. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer is up for sale, with closure or an online-only future if no buyer is found.
As newspapers fight for survival, microblogging and the alternative media are growing at astronomical rates. As Elliott reports on MSNBC.com, "Seven out of 10 Twitter users joined just last year, according to the latest HubSpot 'State of the Twittersphere' report. Somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 Twitter accounts are opened every day. Most microbloggers have a small circle of friends — fewer than 30 — with whom they share their day-to-day thoughts."
An to think all of that growth is based on simple thoughts confined to a mere 140 characters. Incredible.
References:
"Register Announces Changes" by Laura Hollingsworth. The Des Moines Register, January 16, 2009.
"Changing Travel, One Tweet at a Time" by Christopher Elliott. MSNBC.com, January 16, 2009.
"Minneapolis' Star Tribune files Chapter 11" by Jeff Baenen. The Associated Press, January 15, 2009.