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    Online observations of public relations, marketing, advertising and social media; the occasional frivolity; and The Rundown show notes. Jump in, the water's fine.

    Please Note: Everything posted on this blog is my personal opinion and does not necessarily represent the views of my employer or its constituents.

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Internet Party: Social Sites as People

Posted on March 22, 2013 by Luke Armour

Or, Why Nobody Gets Anything Done On the Web.

A new fav. Enjoy.

The Google portion is one of my favorites. Also, Facebook not caring.

YOLO, LOL, SMRICJRES. Okay, I made that last one up.

Filed under: Digital Tools, Frivolity, Internet, Social Media, Social Networks | Tagged: , | 2 Comments »

Friday Frivolity: Look at this Instagram

Posted on February 15, 2013 by Luke Armour

During a very interesting professional development presentation at Kent State University yesterday, I was exposed to this highly entertaining video from College Humor: Look at this Instagram. It says a lot about our desperate need to overuse fun social tools. And what it says about us. Visual communication can be an amazing way to tell stories, but what story are we inadvertently telling? Take a look at your social media posts, bios and pictures. What are you really telling people?

Special thanks to Eric Stoller for the presentation and for showing me this video. I’ll be posting some more in-depth thoughts about his “Digital Identity, Social Media and Higher Education” presentation as time allows. But in the meantime, enjoy…

 

My apologies, but College Humor has disabled embedding this video. You can still click on it to watch on YouTube. It’s worth the click.

Filed under: Digital Tools, Frivolity, Social Media, Visual Communication | Tagged: , , | 7 Comments »

Friday Frivolity – Google Roommate

Posted on June 5, 2009 by Luke Armour

With all of the exciting things being released from Google recently, including the convoluted, yet promising Google Wave, the experimental organized search-relevancy tool that is Google Squared, and the promise of Chrome on Mac and Linux, Google is certainly making strides to bury the release of Microsoft’s search engine Bing continue to be the a powerhouse in search and Internet-based collaboration.

So, what else will Google continue to provide to us – and at what cost? Check out ROOMMATES – Episode 1 from the boys at The Big Honkin, a hilarious adventure when Google becomes their roommate.

I’m looking forward to more, because as Google continues to roll out new services, Google Roommate may not be far behind. Hat tip agian to my colleauge and Internet bloodhound (in the nicest way) JayVee for pointing this out to me.

Filed under: Digital Communications, Digital Tools, Frivolity, technology | Tagged: , , , , , | Leave a comment »

Friday Frivolity – Real Life Twitter

Posted on May 1, 2009 by Luke Armour

As Twitter popularity grows, so does the resulting questioned looks we get as we try to explain it.

And no wonder, imagine Twitter in real life…
[feed readers click through for video]

Vodpod videos no longer available.

more about “Real Life Twitter – CollegeHumor video“, posted with vodpod

This is what happens when you actually say the things you would normally just tweet, out loud and in public.

Very reminiscent of my Friday Frivolity – Facebook in Real Life post from last year.

I harp on this a lot, but you’ve always got to see how your audience is going to see a new tool, a new tactic or a new strategy. So remember this when talking to clients – put on your newbie glasses and try as hard as you can to see what they’re seeing. Whether it’s a new digital approach to an old problem or an exciting new step in unchartered territory; always view it from the audience’s perspective first. Then explain it. Then execute with the client’s blessing.

Because if you don’t explain in properly, your just showing people pictures of your cat.*

*not meant to slight cat people, cat bloggers or cats who blog. Please don’t email hate mail to me, it’s a reference to the video. Watch it again. I love cats, actually. I’m a cat guy myself. If I had a cat, I’ll bet he would blog. I had cats before blogs or at least before most cats blogged. It’s the keyboard she didn’t like. Now, if they come up with some meow-recognition software that actually WORKS, then we’re talking…

Filed under: Communication 101, Digital Marketing, Digital Tools, Education, Frivolity, Social Media, Twitter | 1 Comment »

Friday Frivolity – Twouble with Twitters

Posted on March 20, 2009 by Luke Armour

I, as a humble observer of the digital landscape, merely comment on the buzz therein. So, yes, I appear to be on a Twitter kick, but with good reason, it’s getting popular – and ultimately ridiculed because of it. People and businesses are using it, but still many people outside the fruit-drink chugging circle will look at you like an alien if you try to explain or show them Twitter out of context. As evidenced by the following hilarious video.

While they’re a any number of fantastic communication, entertainment and business reasons to use Twitter – please be very aware of the perception many will have of it. And while I hope the Fail Whale doesn’t try to eat you because of it, certainly your boss or client will if you aren’t prepared with a solid explanation of how this helps the driving goal of the organization.

I’ve been a fan of SuperNews since I posted about the Social Networking Wars some time ago. For more head to http://current.com/supernews or catch the Season Premiere, airing tonight, Friday March 20, 10 PM ET.

Filed under: Digital Communications, Digital Marketing, Digital Tools, Frivolity, Twitter | Tagged: , , | 2 Comments »

Jimmy Eat World Gets Social

Posted on March 20, 2009 by Luke Armour

Here’s a cool update: I just got a DM on Twitter from @jimmyeatworld “thanks for the nice article! and thanks for listening.” Nice work, guys. I’m hooked.

As a fan of both social media and music, I like to report on outstanding social web exercises. One of my favorite bands, Jimmy Eat World, has been forcing me to engage with them online – and I like it.

jimspan

Check out my guest post, Jimmy Eat World Gets Social on The Round Table where I discuss my love affair with the band’s engaging approach to their 10-year anniversary of the Clarity album.

Check Jimmy out online:

Twitter: http://twitter.com/jimmyeatworld

Website: http://jimmyeatworld.com/

Clarity site: http://clarity.jimmyeatworld.com/

Ustream: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/jimmy-eat-world-live

Filed under: Digital Communications, Digital Lessons, Digital Marketing, Digital Tools, Education, Music, Social Media, Social Networks, Twitter, Ustream | Leave a comment »

Blog Scrapers Imagine a Magical Concern

Posted on January 28, 2009 by Luke Armour
RSS Scraping

Original Photo by Bret Arnett

Since there have been blogs, there have been people who steal your content. I’m not taking about borrowing your thoughts or words under a Creative Commons license, I’m talking about directly stealing your content to house on blogs loaded with Google Adwords or other advertising. Actually, for some of these blogs I’m not even sure what the point is. I’m not sure I understand a lot of the scraping and comment spam I’ve seen. If anyone has a good post on it, let me know in the comments.

Shel Holtz briefly introduced CopyGator during episode #416 of The Hobson and Holtz Report last week. CopyGator is:

…a free service designed to monitor your RSS feed and find where your content has been republished in the blogosphere. We automatically notify you when a new post of yours is copied to another feed, we also build an overview page you can view to see how/when/where your content is being duplicated, quoted or plagiarized.

It’s a great idea, but one I haven’t been able to test it out yet.  I’m looking forward to it, as in the past I’ve found a surprising amount of my content posted to other sites, which, while flattering, is annoying.

So while monitoring the blogosphere for some client mentions today, imagine my surprise when I found this bizarre review of a product with the strangest non-native-English-speaking tone to it, i.e.

  • “Imagine a magical concern where you read text scribbled by a kinsfolk member in their poorest cowardly scratch” or
  • “Make trusty to yield a interpret here to intend this terminal entry.”

And while absolutely hysterical to read in the Engrish Funny kind of way, it just shows that for every tool created hackers, scrapers and spammers will figure out a way around it.

Upon further review, I did discover the original blog post written about my client’s product. So apparently scrapers are now taking your content and running it through some sort of thesaurus program or other word-altering script so you can’t easily locate them, except that the product name was still in there along with the images. Not cool. CopyGator appears to work on the feed, not the content, so I look forward to delving further into that and seeing how it works.

So if you find your content being scraped you might want to look into CopyGator. Has anyone tried it? Thoughts? Comments?

For kicks, I just wish I had whatever program they were running this content through. It would be fun to push some classic poems or literature through it, i.e.

  • “To have being or to not exist, that is the interrogatory statement”
  • “Times being the most plentiful, also worst of all were the times.”
  • “More than one pathway did fork in timberland, and myself taken to me the unihabited choice, and that has made all the expression of the form f(x + h) − f(x).”

Filed under: blogging, Blogosphere, Digital Communications, Digital Tools, RSS, technology | 3 Comments »