Posts by Stephen Knightly
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surely there is something remarkable in a politician responding to a campaign emergency with a sophisticated, positive and thoughtful piece of oratory, rather than the usual risible damage control.
That's the beauty of this campaign. Barack Obama can talk directly to his supporters and other voters via YouTube without having to reduce it to soundbites so his message gets through the MSM filtering. Was this speech written for CNN or for voters? It's great to see new technology encouraging more traditional and/or authentic oratory.
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I once heard a senior Google engineer describe Google's secret weapon as: (wait for it) velcro. I don't know if this is still the case, but they used to attach the back of their machines with velco so technicians could just rip out a failed motherboard and replace it with another as quickly as possible, and en masse.
Their IT strategy is indeed to use lots of mass-manufactured machines, and (the clever part) make allowances for them to fail. Aparently when you enter a search query, Google asks several machines at once for the answer, and the fastest reply wins.
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In my experience, the majority of the time in a media training session is indeed educating people about the media (exactly the stuff Russell outlined) and setting their expectations, rather than (supposedly) clever ways to answer questions.
The ideal should be to develop a partnership and relationship between an interesting company spokesperson and the media. I'd like to think that media training helps journalists on the receiving end, particularly when a story about something 'new' is being proactively pitched. Re-acting to enquiries from a journalist during an issue or crisis is a different matter (and assumes investigative journalism is alive and well).
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While Second Life may often be empty and boring, I have had a few constructive private business meetings there. They have mostly been international company meetings with the CEO announcing a new strategy, etc. But having 20 countries come together in a virtual world creates a much better sense of 'prescence' and team interaction than a group conference call, even video conferencing, would.
We could do private IMs, exchange URLs and documents during the presentation - ie, multitask. On a conference call you feel guilty if you're not listening, but in SL it can be encouraged.
I watched the Summit via SL (out of curiosity) for 30 mins this morning. During Sean MDougall's presentation some of the SL participants contributed extra info (like a hyperlink to the Future Problem Solving programme that Rod Oram mentioned). So, we received additional info (and could check it out without being rude) that real world participants didn't.
SL ain't perfect, but it has occassionally added to the experience - when there is a proper purpose for using it.
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Under the Mountain really was scary, for kids and adults. A common theme of many of our best shows here is that they don't patronise childs. The current vogue is for shows to operate on "multiple levels" - for kids and knowing adults at the same time. But one of those levels is often still patronising.
The new Dr Who is fantastic at bringing generations together - both old and young can watch it together, as I think Emma Hart was suggesting. That's family television.
All the current shows with multi-season or season-long story arcs (Lost, Prison Break, Alias, Desperate Housewives) all owe a lot to Babylon Five. Who else had the guts to plot five-years of a series from episode one? I re-watched it earlier this year, and season one is nothing but setup for season two and stuff in season four refers back to the first season.