A group of students and I are rolling out a survey for gamers who play Massively Multiplayer Online Games like Everquest or World of Warcraft. If you or someone you know plays such online games, I would very much appreciate it if you could encourage them to fill out our survey. It can be found at http://schoolof.info/mmog. The results will be presented in Chicago at the Internet Research conference (AoIR).
I like Steve Rubel’s blog—heck I even promoted it in an upcoming FastCompany issue (depending on how they cut the interview)—but I had a visceral reaction to a recent posting on Wikipedia’s Impact on PR. He suggests therein that companies need to police Wikipedia to “counter facts that [he bets] they wish did not appear in Wikipedia at all.”
There’s been some talk about “fact checking” Wikipedia, but such efforts very quickly run into an epistemological brick wall. You can try to drive around that wall, but not without some serious damage to your vehicle. Determining the nature of truth is a thorny problem… imagine that.
Central to Wikipedia’s success is the idea that people contribute to the “discussion” without a hidden agenda. My colleague Tom Jacobson—or Michael Froomkin, I suspect—could tell you that such open and honest communication is necessary for useful public discussion, at least according to some old German guy. Here, let me just say that the idea of PR people (I’m avoiding both “flack” and “professional” here) tweaking the presentation in Wikipedia to better present their client, brings the “ick” factor to the 9s.
There is a reason that Wikipedia discourages vanity pages. Companies changing their entry on Wikipedia, even with the best of intentions, is simply bad form. It smacks too easily of “encyclospam.”
Of course, we are probably pretty naive in assuming that folks with a definite Point-of-View (either their own or one paid for) are not contributing to corporate pages on Wikipedia. In some ways, because the site makes plain the discussions relating to companies, any sort of attempt to control the dialog would likely backfire. Simply the fact that a topic is controversial (consider the Wal-Mart “talk” page on Wikipedia and its discussion of NPOV issues) may be something many corporations would rather was not the case. But there is little they can do at the surface level to affect this; and, in my opinion, little they should do.
If anything, errors of fact or of focus on Wikipedia should tell PR professionals that they need to better present their story to the public. After all, it is the public that maintains Wikipedia..
Kevin writes about Infinity Broadcasting starting an AM broadcast made up entirely of podcasts, submitted, filtered, and checked for FCC acceptability.
Bah, I say.
1: Set up a submission site to add your podcast.
2: Set up a community filtering system. I’m thinking something along the lines of kuro5hin. Those podcasts that are popular (as rated by listeners) gain a slot and maintain it. Yes, there would be first mover advantage, but you would guarantee turnover somehow (e.g., chopping the lowest rated 25% or 50% from the schedule every month).
3: Get people to hook up their computers all across the campus to tiny FM transmitters on the same frequency. These can now be picked up at any local electronics store pretty cheap, or in kit form even cheaper.
4: Enough people add on to the mesh, especially in a relatively small space, and you have a campus-wide (or nation-wide) radio station.
So, who wants to work on it?
(Anyone have links to similar projects. Lazy request, but 30 seconds of Googling didn’t turn anything up.)
Does Louis Vuitton really need to advertise? I guess so, and I suspect that a larger percentage of Yaleys can afford the LV on their bags than those on some campuses. Apparently they are managing to get students to mark sidewalks up and advertise for them. If you think about it, LV has made their mark, so to speak, by having a very visible logo before it was so common. It just makes sense for them to extend that recognizable symbol. Still sucks.
Strange that guerilla marketing, which you would think would be the best choice of an unknown with no marketing budget, is recently the favorite of companies that have more money than sense.
How strange that people are attacking politics on campus, but are not focused on the incursion of commerce.
Congratulations go to Kara Kerwin, who this afternoon successfully defended her masters thesis, Hyperlink Use on Personal Weblogs. I’m sure she will post her thesis once it is submitted and official. She conducted IM focus groups and looked at the motivations for creating hyperlinks on personal weblogs.
We will (once she gets through the red tape) be looking at ways of extending this research. More to come.
Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.- Louis D. Brandeis (in the dissent from Olmstead, 1928)
