Group items tagged

« Previous post Next post » November 22 2007 The Secret Strategies Behind Many “Viral” Videos Dan Ackerman Greenberg 443 comments » Update: Dan has a follow up to this post, here. This guest post was written by Dan Ackerman Greenberg, co-founder of viral video marketing company The Comotion Group and lead TA for the Stanford Facebook Class. Dan will graduate from the Stanford Management Science & Engineering Masters program in June. Have you ever watched a video with 100,000 views on YouTube and thought to yourself: “How the hell did that video get so many views?” Chances are pretty good that this didn’t happen naturally, but rather that some company worked hard to make it happen – some company like mine. When most people talk about “viral videos,” they’re usually referring to videos like Miss Teen South Carolina, Smirnoff’s Tea Partay music video, the Sony Bravia ads, Soulja Boy - videos that have traveled all around the internet and been posted on YouTube, MySpace, Google Video, Facebook, Digg, blogs, etc. - videos with millions and millions of views. Over the past year, I have run clandestine marketing campaigns meant to ensure that promotional videos become truly viral, as these examples have become in the extreme. In this post, I will share some of the techniques I use to do my job: to get at least 100,000 people to watch my clients’ “viral” videos.

True, liberalism everywhere gestures towards the supposed horrors of an alternative political order in order to justify itself, but in the west these days it usually does so with power on its side. Muslim liberals, on the other hand, not only possess little power in their own right, they have also been unable thus far to stage the spectacular acts of sacrifice that mobilise people for a cause - acts of the kind that militants are so adept at performing. These sacrificial acts need not even be violent to be effective, as Gandhi and after him Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela demonstrated so well through the entire course of the 20th century. Perhaps liberals are incapable of staging such spectacles, given their devotion to protecting interests rather than sacrificing them, which is why liberalism has always come to power on the back of far more radical movements dedicated to religion, revolution or revenge.

Morning Edition, July 15, 2004 · A British street artist known as Moose creates graffiti by cleaning dirt from sidewalks and tunnels -- sometimes for money when the images are used as advertising. But some authorities call it vandalism.

I had come to think that our new culture of accountability, which is promoted as the way to reduce untrustworthiness and to secure ever more perfect control of institutional and professional performance, was taking us in the wrong direction.

As the cultural historian Markman Ellis writes, in Eighteenth-Century Coffee-House Culture, the British coffee house, a “heady combination of news, literature, debate and writing”, was “the central locus of newly egalitarian practices of discussion and conversation, including forms of structured discourse, such as lectures and debates, as well as unregulated discourse, such as gossip and chatter”.

The freedom of speech led to time-wasting and “gabbling” (“Here men carried by instinct sipp muddy water, and like Frogs confusedly murmur Insignificant Notes, which tickle their own ears, and, to their inharmonious sense, make Music of jarring strings”). The education on offer was “a school . . . without a master”.

The eighteenth-century coffee house was undoubtedly a great vehicle for the reading of newspapers. A Continental observer in the late eighteenth century noted that, whereas the French coffee house was a place where games were played, in Britain “you neither see billiards nor backgammon tables” because people frequent coffee houses principally to read “the PAPERS”. There was a close and sometimes volatile relationship between the coffee-men and the newspaper-men, which came to a head in 1728, when the coffee-men launched an abortive scheme for setting up their own newspapers. Coffee shops had long been used as places for reading papers without having to pay for them. The coffee-men resented the high price of newspapers and the fact that there were so many of them. The newspaper-men objected that coffee houses relied on newspapers to attract custom. There is a comparable symbiosis now between cafés and information, whether in the form of newspapers (Starbucks has an exclusive deal with The Times, Costa with the Daily Telegraph) or internet connection. It is hard to see which party owes most to whom. As a pamphleteer of 1729 wrote, “Papers mutually beget company, and Company papers”.

Borax is a naturally occurring mineral, soluble in water. It can deodorize, inhibit the growth of mildew and mold, boost the cleaning power of soap or detergent, remove stains, and be used with attractants, such as sugar, to kill cockroaches.

"Jimbo" — was a finance major at Auburn University when the Mises Institute's Mark Thornton suggested he read "The Use of Knowledge in Society," a now-famous essay written by Austro-libertarian economist and Nobel laureate Friedrich von Hayek. The essay argues that prices in the market represent a spontaneous order that results from the interaction of individuals with diverse wants, allowing them to cooperate to achieve complex goals. According to a June 2007 Reason magazine interview, this insight of Hayek's is what led Wales to found Wikipedia. The rather lofty vision that inspired Wales? "Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing."

As is often the case, this paradox can be resolved by recognizing that one of the assumptions is wrong. Here, it's the assumption that U.S. society routinely rejects cruelty and degradation. In fact, the United States is a nation that has no serious objection to cruelty and degradation. Think of the way we accept the use of brutal weapons in war that kill civilians, or the way we accept the death penalty, or the way we accept crushing economic inequality. There is no paradox in the steady mainstreaming of an intensely cruel pornography. This is a culture with a well-developed legal regime that generally protects individuals' rights and freedoms, and yet it also is a strikingly cruel culture in the way it accepts brutality and inequality.The pornographers are not a deviation from the norm. Their presence in the mainstream shouldn't be surprising, because they represent mainstream values:

Both opendemocracy.net and bloggossip.com were very easy to find on the Google search engine. I had no trouble at all finding these two useful sights and thought bloggossip.com was the easiest to read. Blogggossip.com had many bright pictures on the home page which attracted me to the web sight. The sight was very well formated and easy to navigate. Opendemocracy.net appeared to be a bit more credible. All of the stories on this sight were headline stories. One difference between the ezine headline stories and the blog headline stories were that the blog headline stories were geared toward entertainment. It seems as though entertainment is a classic form of headlining here in America, whereas in the global market, headlining is focused on serious issues, such as global warming.Surprisingly enough both web sights, including the blog sight, seemed to be quite credible.

It tries to authorize sharing and reuse — not within a commercial economy, but within a sharing economy. It tries to do so in a way that wouldn't trigger at least most non-copyright rights (though again, most is not all -- a CC BY-NC licensed photograph by a voyeur still violates rights of privacy, for example). And it tries to do so in a way that protects the copyright owner against presumptions about the waiver of his rights suggested by posting a work freely.

This is year two of the Knight News Challenge, a contest awarding as much as $5 million for innovative ideas using digital experiments to transform community news. 

The beauty of open-source applications is that they are continually improved and updated by those who use them and care about them. Dartmouth researchers looked at the online encyclopedia Wikipedia to determine if the anonymous, infrequent contributors, the Good Samaritans, are as reliable as the people who update constantly and have a reputation to maintain.

By subdividing their analysis by registered versus anonymous contributors, the researchers found that among those who contribute often, registered users are more reliable. And they discovered that among those who contribute only a little, the anonymous users are more reliable. The researchers were most surprised to find that the reliability of Good Samaritans' contributions were at least as high as that of the more reputable registered users' contributions.

Man asks of religion, "What is it for?"Religion asks of man, "What are you for?"

Abstract  Most versions of secularization theory expect advanced modernity to weaken religion. In contrast, this chapter argues that two different dimensions of contemporary society affect religion in opposite ways. Rising levels of human security and well-being are assurned to drive towards religious decline, while growing cultural diversity is assumed to push towards religious growth. These two hypotheses are simultaneously investigated, using world wide data for 50 000 respondents from 37 countries with a predominantly Christian heritage. As dependent variables, two dimensions of religious involvement which relate to two core aspects of secularization theory are analyzed: church-oriented religious involvement and preferences for a religious impact on politics. The findings from three different analytical strategies demonstrate that each of the two religious orientations is positively related to the cultural diversity, and also that each of them is negatively related to human security and well-being. Furthermore, the results also indicate that the religious changes which took place between 1981 and 1999/2000 are negatively related to human well-being and security, and positively to cultural diversity. Thus, a set of comprehensive analyses of one and the same set of world wide data indicate that human security and cultural diversity affect religious involvement in opposite ways. It seems too simplistic, therefore, to view modernization as a universal cause of religious decline.

Andrew Puddephatt on media reform from a human rights perspective This morning I attended a very broad and interesting side-event on “Global Information and Communication Policy” organized by Consumer’s Union.  The event featured an international panel of speakers including : Luiz Fernando Marrey Moncau, Instituto Brasileiro de Defesa do Consumidor, Brazil Rosemary Okello-Orlale, African Woman and Child Feature Service, Kenya Bjarne Pedersen, Consumers International Andrew Puddephatt, Global Partners UK Jamie Love, CPTech Andrew issued a provocative challenge to the media reform community to show the evidence of their claims. 

We are interested in moving toward a curating model of information.  Information needs to be curated in  a way that shows the information that you want similar to how a museum curates a large body of information into discrete exhibits and presentations that people can understand and digest.

who is doing the curating?  Is it going to be bottom-up or done by Bill Gates and Google.

“Strauss’s interpretation of Plato is wrong from beginning to end,” Burnyeat argued. “There is much talk in Straussian writings about the nature of ‘the philosopher’ but no sign of any knowledge, from the inside, of what it is to be actively involved in philosophy.”

Strauss said, political philosophy is good for something: “If for no other purpose, at least in order to defend a reasonable policy against overgenerous or utopian thought, we would need a genuine political philosophy reminding us of the limits set to all human hopes and wishes.”

“I was certainly struck by how very skeptical he was for the prospects of establishing democracy in Germany,” Tarcov says. In “Re-education,” Strauss doubted that a just government in Germany could be constructed after the war, at least not if the effort were left to the Allies. “A form of government which is merely imposed by a victorious enemy will not last,” Strauss predicted. “Only Germans, only Germans who remained in Germany and shared all the misery of Nazi rule and of defeat, can do it. Only they will be able to speak a language understandable to post-Hitlerian Germany.”

All of the countries that do this are better off than they would be without international trade. But even though it is possible to prove mathematically that this is true for nations, it is not true for every group of people within nations.

US-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty have said that Web-based propaganda from Iraq is far more complex and sophisticated than Western media give insurgents credit for. Very "fast-paced and clearly aimed at the video game generation", there is a vast myriad - primarily Sunni - of perspectives from the other side of the Iraq War available on the Web, catering to a wide variety of media consumption habits.   

By Anja Boenicke—Conceptual artist Hasan Elahi documents his every move online with hundreds of pictures. He photographs the toilets he uses, the food he eats, the places he sees. He even posts copies of his banking statements. Why has Hasan Elahi become his own Big Brother?