Tabloids do what tabloids do

by PinkMoose

Write and Wrong
[Via Doc Searls Weblog]

When Gizmodo reported on the next-generation iPhone that had come into its hands, I was as curious as the next geek about what they’d found. But I didn’t think the ends justified the means.

The story begins,

You are looking at Apple’s next iPhone. It was found lost in a bar in Redwood City, camouflaged to look like an iPhone 3GS. We got it. We disassembled it. It’s the real thing, and here are all the details.

“We got it,” they said. How?

[More]

Doc gives a very measured response here. My response is not quite as measured, as I am one of the people sites like Gizmodo targets. I’m a customer.

And, now that I know what kind of site it really is, I will not visit it purposefully again.

I refuse to support entities whose business model embraces the purely tabloid approach to information dispersal. ‘Sensational is more important than factual.’

Perhaps Gizmodo did not do something illegal. For me, that does not matter. It did something I believe is unethical, something that I will result in my refusal to support their business. And then, when called on this by many people who had been its readers, Gizmodo inserted itself into the story, publishing a long line of self-justifying rationalizations. Just like other tabloids.

Too late. By its actions, it revealed itself for the tabloid publication it is.

Here is a similar scenario regarding dealing with immoral and possible unethical lines. Say a photographer took pictures of an actress sunbathing nude in her backyard. She has a reasonable expectation of privacy, seeing as how the nearest house to her secluded one is hundreds of yards away. But the photographer used a long telephoto and got the fuzzy pictures.

So, he shows up at a reputable paper, saying he has these pictures. What does a reputable paper do? Their business model is news, not sensationalism. Without some compelling public interest, they would decline the offer. They surely do not pay him for the pictures. It would hurt their business model because it would repel many of their readers.

‘Paying for pictures that are purely salacious. That is what tabloids do.’

Tabloids pay for the pictures and run them. Sometimes they get sued for going to far but the moral line they come up against is one I find very distasteful. So I refuse to give them my business.

By making this a story, Gizmodo revealed itself as purely a tabloid site, reveling in sensationalism over facts. And, then Gizmodo revealed even more about their lack of moral compunction, by invading the privacy of the Apple employee, publishing his name for the internet to see.

Again, the morality for a tabloid is whatever sells, not what is right.

Fine, that is a useful business model for some. Tabloids can be quite successful.

But I refuse to read the tabloids because I do not like the moral lines they cross all the time. Engadget came up to the same line and, for whatever reasons, refused to cross it.

I don’t have time to deal with sites that are not really interested in providing information, where ‘bright, shiny, and rude’ is more important than the facts.

Now I know where Gizmodo’s moral line is. It has lost my interest, my business and I will be sure to tell people just what I think of it.

‘Twitter’ for business

[Crossposted at SpreadingScience]

by cliff1066™

Use Microblogging to Increase Productivity
[Via HarvardBusiness.org]

Are you using Twitter to reach your customers and followers? Do you update your status on Facebook several times a day? Maybe you daily ask questions of one of your specialized LinkedIn groups?

You can replicate this experience inside your organization. There are a number of internal solutions that allow employees to share messages and information with each other, including Yammer and Socialtext. Laurence Smith, Vice President of Global Learning & Development at LG Electronics in Seoul, Korea has become an advocate of Yammer as a way to drive greater innovation in the design of the company’s training programs.

Just a few years ago, Smith says, “when we wanted to revise a classroom training program, we would write a survey, send this to all business unit HR leaders around the world, analyze the results and then use this input to design a new pilot.” The total time elapsed was several weeks to several months and often yielded limited feedback.

But today, Smith and his team start a conversation on Yammer and use tags to create a dialogue with employees. One program in the development stage is FSE (Foreign Service Executive) Soft Landing. It’s targeted to managers assigned to a new country who need to understand the local culture and norms.

[More]

Companies are beginning to see that microblogging approaches can have real value behind the firewall. They are useful fro rapid information dispersion across a variety of devices as well as providing simple ways for people to carry on ad-hoc discussions.

Socialtext continues to have the greatest number of useful social media tools for corporations. and at a very reasonable price also. By making these conversations explicit, not only can the company leverage the information it can also harness the knowledge of all its employees.

And by having everything time stamped, everyone knows who should get the credit for great new ideas or helpful information.

It’s why they call themselves The Smartest Guys in the Room

by Maltesen

Will Wall Street (or the Rest of Us) Ever Learn?
[Via HarvardBusiness.org]

The SEC’s decision to file civil-fraud charges against Goldman Sachs over one of the synthetic securities the investment bank issued during the subprime-mortgage bubble has generated major headlines, roiled the stock market, and otherwise created a flurry of shock and awe from Wall Street to Washington, DC. What I find surprising, though, is how surprised people seem to be by the charges. We still can’t seem to come to terms with just how badly so many “blue-chip” institutions behaved over the last few years, and how easily so many high-profile executives got caught up in the speculative frenzy to turn a quick buck (or, in this case, a quick billion).

I might have been surprised, too, had I not just finished Michael Lewis’s remarkable new book, The Big Short. This account of the subprime-mortgage fiasco, the small band of eccentrics who made billions betting against it, and the army of highly educated, well-dressed, overpaid investment bankers who engaged in a march of folly to the very end, left me angry, shaken, and depressed. It was as if I were reading a bigger, badder account of all the financial booms and busts that had come before–from the junk-bond craze to the LBO wave to the Internet bubble.

As I read the last page and sighed, one question nagged at me: How is it that so many allegedly brilliant people (just ask the folks at Goldman, they’ll tell you how smart they are) never seem to learn? Why do the self-satisfied “lords of finance” keep making the same self-inflicted mistakes, whether they are matters of bad judgment, fraudulent conduct, or outright criminality?

I woke up the next morning, checked out The New York Times, and saw a different version of the same story played out yet again! A front-page article explored how the much-celebrated phenomenon of micro-lending, offering small loans to individuals and entrepreneurs in the poorest countries as a way to lift them from poverty, is facing a global backlash. Muhammad Yunus, the Bangladeshi economist who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for his work in the field, was watching in horror as powerful, hungry, often-reckless banks were rushing in to generate big profits from an idea they either didn’t understand or didn’t care about. “We created microcredit to fight the loan sharks; we didn’t create microcredit to encourage new loan sharks,” Professor Yunus fumed. “Microcredit should be seen as an opportunity to help people get out of poverty in a business way, but not as an opportunity to make money out of people.”

[More]

People overlook all sorts of warning signs as long as they are making money, even if they know that everything is based on false data. Deep down, they know they are walking on a bed of hot coals, hoping they make it across before the heat hits their feet. They know the risk is idiotic. Paradoxically, they often believe they are smarter than everyone else because they also seem to subscribe to the “Greater idiot” theory. “There is always a greater idiot who will buy this from me.”

And that is what makes them smarter, as long as they successfully get out early enough. They know they are smart because only an idiot would have bought what they had to sell. Read anything about credit default swaps and you will understand. Let’s see – totally unregulated derivatives whose total value is about 10 times the entire GDP of the ENTIRE world.

I guess we were idiots to allow this to happen. They were smarter than we were because they got away with it. So much of the financial industry is really run by scam artists.

The scammers do not really create anything substantial, sustainable or of real intrinsic value. They move money around, essentially using variations on the Ponzi scheme, getting more people to invest capital with the knowledge that the financiers will get out before the crash happens.

The article mentions Buffett’s 3 I’s – innovators create opportunities that are copied by imitators, followed by the idiots, who only want to leverage the opportunity to make scads of money.

Now, the idiots have found out that they do not even need to worry about the crash. Because their government surrogates will bail them out, allow them to keep their bonuses and never punish them.

Maybe some of them are realizing that view may not be totally correct. Maybe the people they have always thought were idiots will finally show some smarts.

I hope so. Otherwise, why in the world would we allow them to continue doing this with no real regulation? Only one reason I can think of – we are hopelessly idiotic.

Every luggage company should do a similar video

My New Carry-On- Eagle Creek Tarmac 22
[Via chrisbrogan.com]

The other day I was complaining about my carry-on luggage. I’d just purchased a new Samsonite bag and it wasn’t working nearly as well as my much larger version of the same bag. My friend Mitch Joel told me that he had just the bag I should buy: the Eagle Creek Tarmac 22 (affiliate link). So, I did. And I have to admit, when it came in, I wasn’t very impressed. Frankly, it looked really tiny, and I was worried things wouldn’t fit into it. Then, I tried it out. Here’s a video I shot of unpacking the bag:

It’s amazing how much stuff I got into that bag. I’m in love. It functions exactly the way I wanted it to work, and better. I’m grateful to Mitch Joel for turning me on to it.

[More]

Chris does a great job selling this, especially with his enthusiasm. It is something a smart luggage company would use to market their goods. It really demonstrates the key oint of this piece: it’s ability to carry a lot of clothing efficiently.

Especially in this day of increased fees for all sorts of luggage.

UPDATED: Everybody sucks sometimes. Today it is verizon.

by Sister72

All my verizon.net email accounts have been dead since 7 am today. Over 4 hours with no ability to send or receive email. And it is a pretty bad outage, as even trying to use the web-based pages do not work. In fact, if I try and log-on via the web, it immediately tells me my session has timed out.

Really screwed up and no real information from Verizon. Tried to chat with an expert in support and got a notice that all their people were busy. I’ll bet. The phone lines are all jammed up also. Finally found a community forum at Verizon that demonstrated that this is nationwide.

And. yet, the iDSL still works and I can check out the Verizon status page, over 4 hours since I noticed this states “mail – nothing to report.”

Of course, I only found out about the forum (it was pretty buried) by searching Google foe “Verizon email outage.” Interestingly, Verizon suffered a huge email outage almost exactly 1 year ago, on April 20, 2009. Seems this happens with some regularity.

People may complain about ATT’s wireless service but I have these sorts of things a couple of times a month with Verizon, although none of them have lasted this long. Usually the inability to access or send mail reappears inside of an hour.

How’s ATT’s email? Do they have semi-regular outages like this?

[UPDATE: it is about 1 PM and it looks like things are returning to normal. I can access my email both through the web and mail clients. I really wish Verizon had been a little more transparent about all of this. It would be nice to get an email from them explaining everything.]