Clueless AP Can't Figure Out It's Own YouTube Channel

It's no news that professional journalism, especially of the print variety, is in an ever desperate crisis. The failing economy has only exacerbated the crisis as well as the desperation.

That desperation becomes ever more apparent as the brain trust at the top of mainstream news organizations lashes out at the market, grasping for a stronghold that will preserve what has already disappeared. The more desperate the move, the more evident it becomes that the (old, white, male) leadership of these organizations is completely lost in the (not so new anymore) Internet reality and are, in fact, the largest barrier to their organizations' survival.

Witness this demonstration of ineptitude by the Associated Press:

In its quest to become the RIAA of the newspaper industry, the A.P.’s executives and lawyers are beginning to match their counterparts in the music industry for cluelessness. A country radio station in Tennessee, WTNQ-FM, received a cease-and-desist letter from an A.P. vice president of affiliate relations for posting videos from the A.P.’s official Youtube channel on its Website.

The AP's official channel on YouTube.

Which displays codes for embedding the videos.

A feature that can be turned off.

What is more clueless—not knowing how to operate your own YouTube channel, attacking your affiliate for using it, or not even being aware that you have a YouTube channel? And then to think that it'd be a good idea to emulate the strategy of the music labels? You know, because that's worked out so well.

At what point do the shareholders (or members, in the case of the AP) of these organizations realize that top management is in the deep weeds and should be relieved from the angst of trying to navigate out of it?

Congrats to local journalists Trace Sharp and Christian Grantham on breaking this story and achieving national (even international) coverage of it.

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NashMash Adds Opt-Out Options

Today, the developers of NashMash over at 365 Creative have added a variety of opt-out options for people whose accounts end up on their list of Nashville area Twitter users. Among the options are: not being followed when the bulk follow is processed, not being included in the new randomizer that displays a Nashville Twitter profile at random, not being available to be the featured user of the day, and, lastly, not being included on the public list.

While this is a drastic improvement over the prior situation, I would much prefer to see this as an opt-in list rather than opt-out. This is especially true for accounts that are marked private and I hope that the developers will consider making at least this change. I do like the granularity in the opt-out choices, as they provide reasonable options for finding a comfortable level of participation.

Clearly, the developers are looking to retain as many people as possible on the list, but given the amount of ill will generated yesterday, I'm surprised that they haven't issued a more public statement. A simple post to the website explaining their intentions and apologizing for the inadvertent public launch of the service might go a long way to ensuring that people don't opt-out in droves. It might even gain them some support. Nonetheless, I do appreciate them providing information about the service to me and their willingness to post comments here.

What say you?

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NashMash Releases Frankentwitter on Unsuspecting Nashville Twitterverse

Late yesterday, local Nashville developer 365 Creative released a new Twitter mash-up that quickly generated strong reactions among Nashville users of the Twitter service. Dubbed NashMash, the service allows a Twitter user to follow all the users located in Nashville in one step. That's 1652 new contacts at last count. And countless updates added to the user's Twitter stream.

A few people who enjoy having lots of followers, or who like to follow a lot of people, have reacted positively. A large number of others have reacted with great disdain at the volume of new followers and the notices that come with them. I haven't talked with anyone who submitted their credentials to the service, but I've heard about some negative reactions to the resulting deluge of updates and text messages and frustration at not being better forewarned about what was going to happen to them. [UPDATE: Twitter user andi37206 used NashMash today and certainly had a strong reaction to the results.]

I've been told by one of the developers behind the service that they have stopped processing new requests for now. Once Twitter catches up with the follow requests in queue, we should see an end to the inundation of new followers and notices. I'm also told that the auto-follow feature was developed as a proof-of-concept for a separate commercial application that they envision for Twitter. (I should also note that this person was my source for suggesting the service be called Frankentwitter. Kudos to them for understanding that they released a monster and for having some self-deprecating humor about it.)

Before the service is restored, if it is restored, I would encourage the developers to add at least the following improvements:

1. Do NOT include protected accounts in the list of accounts that will be followed. (For the most part, these people are not interested in unknown followers, so why provoke them.)


2. Provide an easy mechanism for people to opt-out of being on the list of accounts to be followed. (Even better, make the list opt-in, as Dave Delaney has done with his Official Nashville Twitter List.)


3. Explain more clearly that by using the service you will be adding a very large number of accounts to your Twitter feed. (The current instructions aren't very clear on this point.)


4. Provide a mechanism to undo all the follow requests. (I don't know how this would even be possible, especially without un-following all of the people you were following before you bulk-added the others, but good luck to the person who wants to manually un-follow 1600 people.)


5. Do NOT initiate the follows with notifications turned on. (Oh, man, I can't imagine how many text messages are generated by 1652 Twitter users.)

Please add your suggestions and feedback in the comments.

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NBC To Offer Complete Olympics Online — But Only To Windows Vista

Oh, this is rich. For the first time, NBC (which owns rights for the U.S. television market) will offer complete video of the Summer Olympic Games online. Yay! The service, dubbed, "NBC Olympics on the Go" will be available only for users of Microsoft's Vista Home Premium and Ultimate operating systems. Say what?!

But the new service is available only to computers running Microsoft's (MSFT) Vista operating system — a limitation that leaves out millions of Windows XP and Apple (AAPL) Mac users as well as those using mobile devices such as iPods and mobile phones. And only two flavors of Vista — Home Premium and Ultimate — have the Media Center component necessary for running NBC's software. That eliminates most business notebooks.

So, uh, it eliminates all the people who don't have Vista or who have downgraded to XP or who didn't pony up for Premium or Ultimate or who actually might be "on the go" during the games?

It doesn't even look like Microsoft paid for the exclusive. Are these people really this astronomically stupid?

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Our Ecosystem Rocks!

You might have seen this video already, since everyone and their brother linked to it yesterday, but it's still worth posting here just in case you haven't seen it yet and, well, because I just can't pass up commenting on it.

Gruber calls it an "embarrassingly bad internal Microsoft video extolling the virtues of Vista in the enterprise..." that "epitomizes Microsoft’s culture and institutional bad taste."

Boy, that just scratches the surface. This video offends on so many levels, it's difficult to name them all. Let's start with the slaughtering of a Bruce Springsteen classic. Actually, the lyrics by themselves are dismal enough to offend.

And the portrayal of the customers? Mindless pawns easily swayed by slogans and acronyms? Doltish, big-headed boss? Glassy-eyed, star-struck female? Does Microsoft really see its customers like this? Or want its enterprise sales team to see them like this? Now, I know this video wasn't intended for external audiences, and especially not for customers, but how can anyone buy with confidence from a company that values it's customers in this way?

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Color Wars Erupt on Twitter

At approximately 11:05 am CT yesterday, zefrank sent the following tweet:

Good Morning! As you can see, i am now a member of the blue team!

And then all hell broke loose. No one really seemed to know what was going on, but plenty of people wanted to avoid being left out. Teams started sprouting up in support of their favorite colors, or non-colors, or patterns of colors. Within 12 hours, at least 1,000 people had begun following at least one of the 30+ color teams and countless others were asking, "what's this color wars thing?"

Of course, zefrank provided only limited guidance, posting the occasional cryptic tweet throughout the day.

what team are you on? don't make up some imaginary team either...for God's sake the color wars are coming! 11:10 am

i'm losing track of teams - please make sure that your team has a @_____team- for example @blueteam 11:51 am

choose your team, make your badges (you don't have to wear them all the time - just when we start playing) today is "pick your team day" approx. 12:40 pm

ok.now lets be hush about the teams thing.lets put away our badges for the time being.color wars will start soon enough.back to normal :) approx. 2:40 pm

the first colorwar2008 scrimmages will begin in the next couple days...a crack team is working on it approx. 6:40 pm

By the end of the day, most people still didn't know what was really going on, and plenty of people had opted out altogether. Yet even some of the non-players didn't want to be left out and jumped on the noTeam and teamblack bandwagons. And then there were those, like Voltron, calling for peace and unity.

This morning, however, we awoke to a simple tweet from zefrank, linking to his blog post explaining the Color Wars as some kind of virtual recreation of games he played as a kid at summer camp. As word of the explanation spreads, the jury is still out on how popular the actual Color Wars might be, but at least for the first 18 hours or so, the lead-up swept the Twitterverse like a storm. Or, perhaps more fittingly, like a virus -- demonstrating the potential of Twitter for rapid, viral dissemination. As well as the potential for all of us to return to our middle school/junior high days given the right circumstances.

So which color team have you picked? Follow the action at colorwars.net (where this story is re-posted).

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Free My Phone

[The current] mobile phone system... severely limits consumer choice, stifles innovation, crushes entrepreneurship, and has made the U.S. the laughingstock of the mobile-technology world, just as the cellphone is morphing into a powerful hand-held computer.

Right on the money. Literally. (via Fake Steve)

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What the Fuck: Why We Curse

Great fucking essay by Steven Pinker in The New Republic.

Fucking brilliant. (via Daring Fireball)

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Justine Ezarik has lost her mind.

OMG. If you recognize the parody, you will find this unbelievably funny and yet disturbing. If not, then just disturbing. (via Fake Steve)

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Fuel for Thought

Americans who support higher fuel efficiency standards even though they don’t buy fuel efficient cars are not necessarily irrational. Consider:

Back in the nineteen-seventies, an economist named Thomas Schelling, who later won the Nobel Prize, noticed something peculiar about the N.H.L. At the time, players were allowed, but not required, to wear helmets, and most players chose to go helmet-less, despite the risk of severe head trauma. But when they were asked in secret ballots most players also said that the league should require them to wear helmets.

Maybe this also applies to restaurants that support smoking bans. (via Daring Fireball)

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3D Mailbox - Hang out with your mail pool-side

Can you think of anything less useful than this? If you can't, then maybe you need to Get A First Life. (via You So Gangsta)

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Will It Blend? - iPhone

This is sick, sick, sick and So Gangsta.

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First Apple iPhone shipments arrive stateside

Armed guards are extremely unusual for freight coming out of the Asian sector, those familiar with the matter explained, and are typically reserved for shipments containing riches such as gold and diamonds.

Good grief. Gold and diamonds?

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With hype high, iPhone may have to fight a flop

"God himself could not design a device that could live up to all the hype that the iPhone has gotten," said David Platt, a computer science professor at Harvard University.

A classic quote, no doubt. But, there's more...

Blogs chronicle leaks about the phone like children plotting Santa's path from the North Pole.

Jump for the rest.

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Crazy Rotating Wall Makes You Wonder if You Are Crazy Too

Not really sure what the point of this is, but somebody sure spent a lot of time and money making it.

Jump for details or larger video.

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$27 million anti-evolution museum to open soon

Well, this pretty much explains what's wrong with our country and its leadership. Aren't these the same people who voted for our dunderhead-in-chief?

When the Gallup Poll asked people about their views on the subject last March, 47 percent of Americans polled said that God created humans pretty much in their present form some time in the last 10,000 years. That belief was strongest among those with less education, regular churchgoers, people 65 and older, and Republicans.

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K-Fed Launches His Own Search Engine; Internet Loses Yet More Dignity

Yes, the guy who somehow escaped his marriage with Britney Spears looking like the sane one now has his own branded search engine that offers you chances to win prizes (going to Kevin's birthday party, OMG!) every time you search.

Hmm, they use Yahoo's search engine, but their contact email is at gmail.

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