See What’s Out There

Online Dating Helping Pathetic Women Get Their Hopes Crushed More Efficiently

We talk a lot about video, but pictures can do amazing things as well to educate and inform and move an audience. For example…

What The World Eats is a photo essay about what families around the world eat. It’s a series of pictures of a family in a different country posing with all the food they eat in a week. It also shows the cost of that food. The regional differences and taste differences are amazing. It’s a big issue of concern to the global development community. Click here to check it out.

The photographs are by Peter Menzel from the book “Hungry Planet.“

The Make Your Media Matter conference put on by the Center for Social Media at American University was a great success last week. We co-hosted the reception on Thursday night and there was a great turn-out and great energy at the conference.

One of the most interesting discussions this year was about gaming. Games have come to rival (or exceed) Hollywood in terms of dollars. Gaming is huge. From the console games played on those Playstation, Wii, and XBoxes, to what are called “causal games” like online Scrabble or what you have at the cool website Free Rice.

On the gaming panel was Eric Brown, the CEO of ImpactGames. ImpactGames is the publisher of PeaceMaker, a game where you can make peace between Israelis and Palestinians. The game started as a project of Eric Brown and co-founder Asi Burak as part of their program in Entertainment Technology at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh. They are now working on some new games that are very interesting.

One of their games is called Play The News, and it basically has the player learn about a current news event, put themselves in the shoes of one of the parties in the news event, and then predict what will happen in real life. A kind of companion social network then tracks and rates how the people did in predicting the outcomes.

The thing about games is that it requires the player to make decisions. And by making decisions you can feel empathy for the people in whose shoes you are walking. You can also see the consequences of decisions that might seem obvious on first blush, but that have more complicated implications.

The whole world of “Games for Change” is growing rapidly. There is an annual conference that’s gotten huge and a lot of nonprofits are wondering how they can harness the power of gaming to promote their work and their issues.

Here’s some background on PeaceMaker:

You think the Yes We Can video was inspiring. Look at what the McCain people came up with.

In January, Barack Obama raised as much money, $28 million, as Howard Dean raised in his entire campaign last time around. And they have done it using $25 and $50 donors. Think about it. On the one side you have the traditional way to raise money — rich people asking other rich people to give. “Bundling” is when the partner asks all the associates to ante up the maximum to attend a local fundraiser.

An individual may give $2,300 per federal election. So if I give $2,300 to Clinton I am “maxed out” and the only way for me to do more is get $2,300 from my buddies. Lets say I am that law partner and by making a lot of calls I can get 50 people to max out for my candidate. That’s $117,300, including my own contribution. I become a Hillraiser.

The Obama campaign is raising money differently. They have raised lots of money from those small donors. For the Obama campaign to get to $117,300 from $25 donors mean they have 4692 people donating instead of only 51. Wow.

We care about this because we care about using the internet for fundraising and advocacy. What Obama is doing is a major milestone in the development of the web. The internet, only the internet, makes possible this kind of retail fundraising. There would simply be no other way to get people, excited in their own homes, across the country, inspired by speeches and videos, organized enough to get these donations flowing. People wouldn’t write the checks or fill out the forms, but they can click and give, just like they click to buy a book or a Pez dispenser or, in 2008, pay their parking tickets.

The Obama campaign says they have more than 350,000 donors this year so far. 350,000 donors! Holy smoke that’s a lot of donors. And they are talking about this many in just over a month.

What the internet makes possible, the candidate makes happen. The internet didn’t raise the money. Obama’s inspiration activated people and the internet made it possible to turn that excitement into dollars. As I have written before, the Obama campaign has been amazing at using video to make that excitement portable across the web, capturing those moments that get people juiced.

There is a lot to learn from this campaign and at See3 and among other nonprofit communicators we will be studying it for a long time to come.

One thing I have learned about the Internet is the persistence of information. Once it goes up, it’s up. A fun thing to do is to go to the Internet Archive’s “Way Back Machine” which has 85 billion web pages archived from 1996. Here’s what Yahoo! homepage looked like exactly 10 years ago today.

A common story is one where a blogger posts something and then regrets it. Maybe they were too candid about their company or their boss. They take the post down. No one noticed the original post, and few people read the blog, but once they take it down lots of people are interested in what it says. Someone found it archived, reposted it, and now many more people saw it than would have originally if it was left up.

In today’s NY Times is an article about Facebook and the difficulty of getting your data removed. It’s a little complicated because when I send you a message that message is in my account and your account. So to really delete my entire life on Facebook would mean deleting data from many individual accounts.

The lesson is, be careful what you put online and maybe, just assume all is lost on the privacy front.

“It’s like the Hotel California,” said Nipon Das, 34, a director at a biotechnology consulting firm in Manhattan, who tried unsuccessfully to delete his account this fall. “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.”
…
Facebook’s quiet archiving of information from deactivated accounts has increased concerns about the network’s potential abuse of private data, especially in the wake of its fumbled Beacon advertising feature.

That application, which tracks and publishes the items bought by Facebook members on outside Web sites, was introduced in November without a transparent, one-step opt-out feature. After a public backlash, including more than 50,000 Facebook users’ signatures on a MoveOn.org protest petition, Facebook executives apologized and allowed such an opt-out option on the program.

Tensions remain between making a profit and alienating Facebook’s users, who the company says total about 64 million worldwide (MySpace has an estimated 110 million monthly active users).

I wrote recently about the decline of newspapers and the rise of the web. Marc Andreessen, the founder of Netscape, Ning and an internet thinker (and billionaire), wrote a post today on his blog called Inaugurating the New York Times Deathwatch.

Reading it you get the sense that these folks just won’t face the music. Their business model is near death and they better move faster to preserve whatever value they still have.

He shows vividly how the New York Times business has eroded, how their ad revenues are way down, circulation is down, etc. He makes fun of The Boston Globe’s (owned by the NY Times) decision to raise prices:

“When you have an obsolete, inconvenient physical product that nobody wants in an era of universal online access, the appropriate strategy is clearly to raise the price.”

He says “Sometimes it’s darkest right before it’s pitch black.”

The punchline is this:

Well, given that the Internet is the central force dismantling the company’s business, I’m sure that by now they’ve stocked their board with noted Internet experts. Let’s see:

* Brenda C. Barnes — CEO of Sara Lee; noted snack cake expert

* Raul E. Cesan — former CEO of Schering-Plough; noted Levitra expert

* Daniel H. Cohen — president of DeepSee LLC, “an oceanic exploration and submarine leasing company”; noted Jacques Cousteau expert

* Lynn G. Dolnick — former head of exhibits for the National Zoologic Park in Washington DC; noted marsupial expert

* Michael Golden — current publisher of the International Herald Tribune; former head of the company’s Women’s Publishing Division; noted sundress expert

* William E. Kennard — former head of the FCC; noted “seven dirty words” expert

* James M. Kilts — former CEO of Gillette; noted smooth, smooth shave expert; prior to that, unindicted coconspirator at Philip Morris; noted expert on your grandfather’s hacking cough

* David E. Liddle — here I have to take a pause as I actually know this one; based on what’s happening at the company, it could be reasonably asked whether he’s actually attending the board meetings.

* Ellen R. Marram — former CEO of Nabisco; noted Oreo expert. Oh, wait, she actually ran an Internet company: “From 1999 until 2000, Ms. Marram was president and chief executive officer of efdex Inc. (the Electronic Food & Drink Exchange), an Internet-based commodities exchange for the food and beverage industry.” Ooh. I wonder if that ended well.

* Thomas Middelhoff — former CEO of Bertelsmann; noted expert on complicated family politics — well, that’s probably coming in handy…

* Janet L. Robinson — current CEO of the New York Times Company; noted expert on horrific business implosions

* Doreen A. Toben — CFO of Verizon; noted 30-year debenture expert

* And finally, Arthur O. Sulzberger, Jr. — the Big Kahuna — the Man — the Guy In Charge — the chairman and scion — the dude with the cojones to actually defend Judy Miller. Not noted Internet expert.

So, if you want to issue bonds to pay for FCC-approved snack cake manufacturing in a submarine on display at a national park by a sundress-wearing cigarette-puffing Levitra-popping Judy Miller, you’re pretty much set.

Go team!

It feels to me like something is happening here. I guess we’ll see on Tuesday.

It was a creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of a nation.

Yes we can.

It was whispered by slaves and abolitionists as they blazed a trail toward freedom.

Yes we can.

It was sung by immigrants as they struck out from distant shores and pioneers who pushed westward against an unforgiving wilderness.

Yes we can.

It was the call of workers who organized; women who reached for the ballots; a President who chose the moon as our new frontier; and a King who took us to the mountaintop and pointed the way to the Promised Land.

Yes we can to justice and equality.

Yes we can to opportunity and prosperity.

Yes we can heal this nation.

Yes we can repair this world.

Yes we can.

We know the battle ahead will be long, but always remember that no matter what obstacles stand in our way, nothing can stand in the way of the power of millions of voices calling for change.

We have been told we cannot do this by a chorus of cynics…they will only grow louder and more dissonant ……….. We’ve been asked to pause for a reality check. We’ve been warned against offering the people of this nation false hope.

But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope.

Now the hopes of the little girl who goes to a crumbling school in Dillon are the same as the dreams of the boy who learns on the streets of LA; we will remember that there is something happening in America; that we are not as divided as our politics suggests; that we are one people; we are one nation; and together, we will begin the next great chapter in the American story with three words that will ring from coast to coast; from sea to shining sea –

Yes. We. Can.

Celebrities featured include: Jesse Dylan, will.i.am, Common, Scarlett Johansson, Tatyana Ali, John Legend, Herbie Hancock, Kate Walsh, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Adam Rodriquez, Kelly Hu, Adam Rodriquez, Amber Valetta, Eric Balfour, Aisha Tyler, Nicole Scherzinger and Nick Cannon