“Fleishman posted the book online in PDF format last month. He expected a few hundred downloads. Instead, it was grabbed about 10,000 times in just 36 hours.|It took Fleishman a couple of days to realize how much traffic the book was attracting. But by the time he pulled the file offline, he was on the…
“Peter Arnett, recently fired from NBC for giving an interview to Iraqi TV, has provided a lesson in media relations in today’s global society…. We live in a celebrity age. Arnett had turned himself into a controversial celebrity. As such, anything he says is fair game. The Dixie Chicks just learned this when lead singer,…
What does the above title make you think? It’s a quote from an article in the Chicago Daily Herald., which reports that in a particular precinct, a worker registered 127 residents of a treatment center for sex offenders; 120 residents of that facility later submitted absentee ballots. “In the clerk’s race, 229 voters were cast…
“Bidding on the auction site eBay ended Friday after a month on the Internet auction site with no offers reaching the minimum reserve price. Amboy, with seven residents, has a listed value of $1.9 million, but the top bid reached only $995,900.|Amboy has a post office, motel, cafe, gas station, church, gift shop and two…
I found this quote on Megnut: “59% of all Americans believe that what is written in the Bible’s Book of Revelations will come to pass.” She was citing a BBC article about Bush and religion. My question is this… what, specifically, does the study say 59% of Americans believe about Revelations? Conservative evangelical churches can’t…
“Former astronaut Sally Ride says before Columbia exploded, the U.S. space agency may have gotten too used to foam breaking off the fuel tanks and striking the shuttle’s thermal protection system. | Investigators believe hard foam insulation falling from the external fuel tank during launch may have damaged the shuttle’s wing. The spacecraft broke apart…
“Fourth-graders in the United States score better in reading than many of their peers around the world, but poor and minority U.S. students still lag behind other U.S. learners, a new international study shows. | Students in U.S. public schools outperformed 23 of 34 other countries in the project, known as the Progress in International…
“It is bound to go down as one of the great moments in PR history. | With US tanks rolling into Baghdad and the sound of artillery fire reverberating around the city, Iraq’s ever jovial information minister popped up yesterday to declare that the ‘infidels’ were facing ‘slaughter’…. Standing on the roof of Baghdad’s Palestine…
After I dubbed Yahoo’s new search engine “Yahoogle”, Clancy Ratliff wrote (in a KairosNews discussion thread): You know, I love the name “Yahoogle.” I wish it were called that and not “Yahoo Search.” We could also have “Lycoogle,” “AltaVoogle,” “NoogleLight,” “Dooglepile,” “AskJoogle,” etc. Instead of “Dooglepile,” I suggest “DogPoogle.” Actually, somebody has already registered “Yahoogle.com,”…
“Cecile de Brunhoff, the inspiration for Babar, the enchanting little elephant whose adventures captivated generations of children, has died in Paris. She was 99.” —Inspiration for ‘Babar the Elephant’ DiesAP) To say that somebody was the inspiration for a cartoon Elephant suggests something unflattering. The headline could have been clearer: “Inspiration for ‘Babar’ Stories Dies”…
A chart comparing newspaper references to the terms “weblog” and “blog”. Not only is usage of both terms on the rise, “blog” is overcoming “weblog”. Via Torill Mortensen —“Weblog” vs. “Blog”Eszter’s Blog) Similar:Dear readers: Please stop calling us ‘the media.’ There is no such thing.When my students refer in passing to “th…CultureShe was accused of…
“Be pro-active, not reactive. Tell stories that provide background and context FIRST. We’ve tried to avoid two traps some media organizations, including The Bee, have fallen into: The ‘minority of the week’ story (writing about minorities for the sake of writing about minorities, i.e., ‘Here are our Latinos!’). The ‘minority bad news story of the…
“It is very puzzling that in a country where a 12-year-old knows baseball statistics, adults don’t know the simplest statistics about tests, diseases, and the consequences that may cause them serious damage. Why is this? One reason, of course, is that the cost benefit computations for doctors are not the same as for patients. One…
“The government is not a grotesquely inefficient and expensive IT customer by accident; it’s GI&E by design. It is in the best interests of proprietary vendors for the government to be painful to deal with precisely because it sets up barriers of entry to innovation and entrepreneurship.|If the government truly was a ‘better’ customer, it…
“Detective Smith — who calls himself a ‘Starbucks, Barnes & Noble kind of guy’ — has become something of an expert in early teenagedom, and he has done so without the benefit of having offspring of the appropriate age. He ventures into cyberspace under some 30 different screen names, mostly as girls, each with her…
“The findings prove that the world experienced a Medieval Warm Period between the ninth and 14th centuries with global temperatures significantly higher even than today. | They also confirm claims that a Little Ice Age set in around 1300, during which the world cooled dramatically. Since 1900, the world has begun to warm up again…
“Kelley’s insightful window on the details of the war brought him increasing readership (118,000 page views on a recent day) and acclaim, including interviews in the The New York Times and on NBC’s Nightly News, Newsweek Online and National Public Radio.| The only problem: Much of his material was plagiarized — lifted word-for-word from a…
“University officials say once file traders are notified they’re breaking the law, they don’t tend to repeat the offense. | But some believe the recording industry is so fed up with the continuing problem of illegal file swapping that it’s trying to send a message to administrators and students.” —RIAA Hits Students Where It HurtsWired)…
“Recent recruits who grew up on popular commercial games like Half-Life, Counterstrike and Quake 3 have a natural affinity for the training games, many of which are adapted by the military from the retail versions. Some military officials are enthusiastic about the benefits of running troops through the exercises at minimal expense.|But as video war…
“Today’s web sites, particularly e-commerce sites, can be more complex than standard software products that often confine users to a very limited set of activities. Web tasks are also vastly more complex than those users have with most software applications. For example, our tests asked users to complete shopping tasks. No two users looked for…