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Shel Holtz
Communicating at the Intersection of Business and Technology
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FIR #196: Speak Up, Twitter

FIR #196: Speak Up, Twitter

  • FIR #196: Speak Up, Twitter

The June 2020 episode of The Hobson and Holtz Report features Neville and Shel discussing…

  • Their appearance on Joe Jaffe’s broadcast show
  • A report on the all-virtual IABC World Conference
  • Twitter’s move to let users record and tweet audio
  • Three new blockchain developments of interest to communicators
  • Flipboard’s new Storyboard feature
  • A user email that prompted Merriam-Webster to update a dictionary definition
  • How Wikipedia became a battleground for racial justice
  • Facebook’s news tab and Instagram’s rise as a source of news

Dan York reports on inclusive language in technology and big players making big plays in podcasting.

We are hosting an FIR Communicators Coffee Break on Zoom each Thursday during the stay-at-home period at 1 p.m. ET. For credentials, contact Shel or Neville directly or request the credentials in our Facebook group or send an email to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). Spread the word to your communications community.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog.

Links from This Month’s Episode

Links from Dan York’s Tech Report

Unedited Descript Transcription

Hello, communicators, business people, students of communication, and the community curious, you’re listening to for immediate release the first and longest running podcast for communicators, where today Neville and I talk about audio tweets, the pros and cons. There’s been a flood of new blockchain initiatives of particular interest to communicators.

Flipboard has introduced a stories format that holds a lot of promise. We have a great story about a company. Listening to a customer. Wikipedia has become a battleground over the George Floyd story. And we’ll talk about Facebook, Instagram, and news. Dan York share some thoughts on big players in podcasting like Spotify and Pandora.

It’s all coming your way right now on for immediate release, another fine podcast from the fir podcast network. This is for media release, the podcast for communicators.

Well, greetings everybody, and welcome to four immediately. Release episode number 196 of the Hobson and Holtz report for Monday, June 22nd, 2020. This is Shel Holtz in Concord, California. And this is Neville helps them in brick mill in England. And we are here for our monthly review of some of the news and posts and research that has been shared in the last month.

We’ve also been continuing our fir zoom chats. Uh, we, we had a two week break for different reasons each week. But we were back this past Thursday and we are scheduled for the upcoming Thursday. So, uh, if you’re interested, uh, drop us a note to fir .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) and we’ll share the credentials with you.

We have a good chat. It’s, it’s a lot of fun. Uh, it’s good to talk to fir listeners, uh, just about what’s going on in our lives. And we think about all the news that we tend to report here on the show. A couple of things to share with you before we jump into our. Stories for the month. Uh, first I just want to remind everybody of something that I shared last month, about how communicators can help save lives, which is actually the headline of an article appearing on the campaign U S website from a couple of weeks ago.

It covers the story that we talked about, about how the United nations launched a unique open, brief for global creatives to create content, to reinforce the behaviors from. People to deal with the coronavirus pandemic in two weeks. From the time they. Presented the brief, uh, thousands of pieces were created, uh, from 143 countries.

And they’re up on the web to be shared. I have been sharing one a day on a Microsoft team that we set up at web court where I work, uh, just for pandemic related conversation. And I’ve decided I’m going to start sharing one a day to Instagram, too. They’re really amazing pieces of art, and you’ll find .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

A vision of images, a short MP4 is all kinds of great content to share there. Yeah, it was something, I mean, when we talked about that last month, I remember learning through, looking at that before the show was quite extraordinary, the call to action response that they had and the, um, the way in which the folks who organize that were trying to, I think in 30 days, reach a billion people or something was six significant amount of people to get the word out about this really quite something.

Yeah, great example of crowdsourcing. So, um, one other thing to mention is that, uh, you and I shell had a, a great opportunity to engage re-engage if you will, with our. Our old friend, Joseph Jeffy boss, he of crayon where we were all crayon listers back in 2006, 2007. So 13, 14 years ago. And I’m second life featured large in that history.

So, uh, it didn’t feature large in the. Conversation we have with Joe much, or we did talk about it a bit far. This was Joe’s new show, which runs on a live on YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Periscope by Twitter. And I think he’s got a couple of other places as well. Um, so, uh, we joined Joe as. Special guests.

And those shows up. If you would like to watch the video, you can also download the audio as a podcast. Uh, we’ll have links to that in the show notes. Um, you had to leave, uh, you couldn’t stay for the long for the, uh, uh, after event party Joe had, which is via zoom. And I liked the technique of that after met, um, that you have the.

The public show, uh, which, uh, has guests or, or an audience let’s say, uh, and the platform Joe used, actually it was stream yard. It wasn’t the same as this one. And let’s you let’s people send in comments while you’re on the air and all this kind of stuff. And zoom was more of a private one. And, uh, there were about half a dozen people in that conversation, which went on for quite a while to talk about some of the things that we discussed in the, in that to show Joe is doing these things, I think, am I right?

Shell daily, if not daily, if not close to daily. Yeah. So he’s putting a lot of work into this, and I think it shows in the, uh, in the, uh, in the result they’re really well done. And of course it is all about Joe and he does this very well. I think so I enjoyed being on that with him and, uh, and being able to catch up with Joe after such a long time and, uh, you know, chat about those days in the context of what’s going on now, basically.

It was a lot of fun, a good conversation. I know he’s had a couple of other former Korean Easters on the show. I believe CC Chapman. He was a good one. So, uh, yeah. Good luck to Joe. I don’t know if these are archived. Can you watch the recordings of these? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, the links we’ve got for the show notes.

We’ll we’ll be to the, Oh good. Yeah. I need to bookmark those because he’s had some guests I would have liked to have heard, but the time they’re on is prime work time for me, so, right, right. Can’t do that. Uh, last week I attended the IABC world conference. It had been scheduled to take place in Chicago from June 4th to seventh.

Uh, 14th to 17th, uh, that schedule had been set for a long time. And then of course, Corona virus struck and IBC moved fairly quickly. Uh, I’m not going to say real quickly, cause I remember over on the fellows, Facebook page, we were. Musing about when they might make a decision about what was going to happen.

But, uh, they finally did, uh, make this decision not to cancel the conference, but to make it all virtual. And then they moved very quickly identifying a vendor, uh, and getting it all set up so that it would, it would work well. Um, it was, you know, the same keynote speakers who had been scheduled the same breakout sessions, even the gold Quill.

Awards gala was all virtual and about 900 people registered, which is really not far off the pace for a regular old conference. Usually they get about 1200 onsite and some of them are not paid. Right. Um, but, uh, the, the company that provided the platform was called. In Toronto, I N T R ado. I’d never heard of them before, but they did a great job with this.

So when you sign in, you go to the lobby and from the lobby, you can go to places like the theater, where you find the keynotes and, and the breakout sessions. There was an exhibit hall where you could. Chat with vendors and look at their resources and, and, uh, download materials and watch videos. Uh, there was a lounge, they had five topics and people would just go hang out between sessions and talk about stuff like employee and customer engagement, career and future skills, marketing and brand, uh, and the damn thing.

Just worked really, really well. A few little glitches where people are using their internet connections from home. So there were some bits where you couldn’t hear what they were saying, or they would freeze for a couple of seconds, but nothing overwhelming or anything that broke the deal. Um, I spoke on Sunday at the strategic advisor forum had about 190 people watching a lot of chat going on during my talk, as well as a, a Q and a.

Section where I was able to respond to those. I was skeptical going into this about a four day conference. You attended by planting your button, a chair and watching a monitor, but it worked. And, you know, they also had long breaks where you could actually get out of your chair and go do other stuff. Um, if you didn’t want to stay.

In your chair and go to the lounge. Uh, of course I’d rather have been in Chicago, eating in the restaurants and meeting people in the hallway that I hadn’t seen in years and, and moving between sessions and, and going to the exhibit hall and enjoying the coffee breaks and the like, but if you can’t do that, this ends up being.

A really viable alternative. Uh, yeah, every speaker I think said I’d rather be there in Chicago with you face to face that. Of course. Yeah, we would. But this worked, uh, the content was outstanding. I heard a lot of people talk about how much they got out of the sessions. And one interesting. Uh, aspect of this is that everything was recorded.

Obviously it had this available to people who paid for registration for a year. So it’s not a matter of choosing this breakout session over that one. You choose the one you want to go to live and you have a year to watch all the others. Uh, so you can actually go to every session. Uh, I can also see this being used as a way to make a, a real conference.

Yeah, it’s being held in a venue where people are face to face, but make that available to people who maybe can’t get there, uh, as a second tier of participating in the conference. Um, anyway, uh, I just wanted to tell Natasha Nicholson and the entire IBC team, they did a great job making this thing work.

It would have been a lot easier to just cancel it and. Yeah, right. They went into paid off. Yeah. I’ve heard comments that were very positive about the event. Like you said, shell, uh, this is the new normal though, isn’t it? Uh, so many organizations are moving this way in, in one way or another, from small scale to large scale with quite some sophistication.

Um, like you said, a face to face. This won’t replace face to face. Of course, I don’t believe the ones that I’ve heard about them have paid attention to are trying to do that. They’re not at all recognizing the circumstances in which we are these days and most countries that, uh, uh, you know, travel’s not on, you can’t stay anywhere cause hotels aren’t open.

And even if they were, you’ve got a social determinant, all these complexities. But I guess every company is still trying to work through. So this will be with us for quite a while. It’s not a, uh, maybe a permanent feature for many. So, uh, but the office terrific opportunities I think, to, to bring, um, you know, ranging from what you just said, I you’ve signed up.

To be at this event on a certain date. So you did, uh, but you have access to be able to, to see all the content for 12 more months. So, you know, that was, that’s not a common thing, um, in many conferences and if that’s kind of late available to everyone with, with, with low, low barriers to access, then that’s a good thing coming out of all of this.

Yeah, and I was certainly not going to be the last full conference done that way. Apple is about to host its worldwide developer conference entirely online. So yeah, so this, this is a part of the future. And the other thing you mentioned too, that caught my attention was when you said, you know, some people are dialing in from home as it was.

So the connections weren’t too good. That’s the landscape and we look at TV news. Um, I see TV news. You, you must see similar on us channels. I see that when I look at the BBC news of interviewing someone government minister, let’s say, uh, is in his bedroom. Well, not quite he’s in his home office, which probably has a bed tucked out of camera view with the cat wandering around.

Right. And he’s gone, you know, buds in, or even the white Apple product, uh, AirPods. It is. Yeah. Or, or another brand. Yeah. And the audio quality is a bit iffy here and there, and there’s a lag and then someone else is on and they’ve got a brilliant connection. And then you’ve got others who have invested in, in, uh, in studio presence, type presentation doing well.

I I’ve always found the, a, it just as a small aside on that, the, the journalists themselves, uh, are very engaging when they are on TV reporting. And it looks like they’ve got the same kind of equipment you’ve got in your home office. It’s not that they got really cool broadcasting stuff from the broadcaster.

They’ve got ear buds in there is to, uh, so, you know, there’s a really, really good level though. It seems to me, but that’s, that’s the nature of it. And you find that the value then you you’ll get from the event I suspect is going to be the experience it gives you. That isn’t necessarily totally different.

Um, so you, you end up to your point, you made about sitting in a chair for hours. You’ve got to find a way to engage people in, in, in different ways. Somehow that makes them conclude at the end of it. I’m really glad I went to this. Yeah, and some are doing it by what you’ve been saying. I, I clearly feel that IBC is doing it, the company, they hired to do this for them, uh, and others too.

So it’s an evolving thing. It’s a great market for someone to, uh, to get an edge on this. And by the way, It also highlights something that is critically important, more and more now. And it’s not just a CEOs and other senior people in the organization. If you’re representing an organization, whether attendees at a conference or a speaker and on a video thing, you’ve got to really up your game to present yourself extremely well.

Uh, some people have gone overboard. Uh, I was at an event. Uh, the other day actually, uh, where two of the people there were kind of right in your face with logos and all this crap in the kind of, uh, what do you call it? Backgrounds they had, uh, over the top completely, um, uh, others really, you know, lighting, uh, the cause of the microphone.

Uh, and if you’re doing this at home, Are you going to have to upgrade and pay a bit more for your broadband can actually get decent network speeds. All this stuff is now on the agenda. So interesting time. Yeah. Oh, by the way, one other thing they did, uh, that I was really impressed with was the gold Quill banquet, which has always been a challenge because you’ve got people crossing the stage to get something like 150 awards.

They also give out the special awards, right? The, uh, the Ray Hamlin award and. And the award for best measurement. And then they introduced the new fellows and it’s a three and a half hour event. And they try to find ways to break it up with entertainment. But by the time it ends half the people who were there were already gone.

Uh, so what they did. In order to make it work here was, uh, they presented it as a live stream on YouTube, but it was all prerecorded video. And the whole thing lasted 90 minutes. And I’m thinking I would be willing to sit and have rubber chicken in a banquet room if they did it like this. Right. Instead of trying to stretch it out, you know, the people could cross the stages.

Their names are scrolling by it. It worked really well. I was able to sit and watch the entire thing. They also did special video interviews with the new fellows and they had video features for the best of the best. Um, good job. Good job. Excellent. Well, we do have news to report, uh, today, but before we get to that, uh, I do want to, uh, share some information about our sponsor polite mail.

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So I implore you. Visit polite mail, uh, at polite mail.com and check out all the great resources available there. And we thank polite mail for their support of, for immediate release. So you probably heard last week or last week, it would have been that Twitter has done something interesting with, uh, audio.

Uh, what would your tweets, I suppose you could call them. That’s not what Twitter is calling in though, but yeah. What they’ve done is rolled out a feature currently on test iOS users only. That’s going to happen over the next few weeks to let users record and add up to 140 seconds of audio to tweets.

They say, we’ll add a more human touch to the way we use Twitter, your very own voice. Uh, how does it work? Well to start with you open the. Tweet composer. So in your app, you tap the little icon that lets you start writing. And there’s a new icon that has wavelengths the symbol, like a way for me to get familiar with that kind of thing in audio that’s um, yeah.

So look at it. You think, Oh, that must be, you know, what you press, so you do, you’ll see your profile photo with a record button at the bottom. You tap to record your voice. It’s that simple. Um, once you’ve hit 140 seconds is I found this bit quite interesting. Um, you can just continue talking and it will start a new recording.

So there’s lots of 140 seconds and you keep talking. Once you reached the time limit for a tweet, a new voice tweet starts automatically to create a thread. Once you’ve done your tap, the done button to end your recording, go back to the composer screen as you as normal to, to tweet. People will see your voice tweet appear on the timeline alongside other tweets to listen to you, tap the image.

A playback will start in a new window to the bottom of your timeline, and you can listen as you scroll. You can also keep listening while doing the other things on your phone or on the go. So it’s a, it’s pretty feature full. I thought this was quite an interesting development and I’m looking forward to it.

Rolling out to Android is only on iOS at the moment. I’ve seen a lot of comments about this shell. A lot of it, uh, critical, uh, more of it’s actually very positive. Um, so it’s interesting in particular, one point, which I thought, um, Jason cobbler in vice pinpointed quite. Accurately. How is Twitter going to moderate?

These voice recordings or audio recordings are notoriously difficult to moderate. His says, and Twitter already has a Harrison and white supremacist problem. Uh, there are a few things worth mentioning here. He notes in order to upload audio to Twitter before this update, it had to be linked from a third party platform like SoundCloud or uploaded as a video file.

Twitter is now letting people upload sounds directly, which in theory, isn’t the worst idea in the world. He says, if implemented correctly, it could allow musicians to upload music, podcasts, easy upload snippets, and parts of the world that are used to sending voice memos to upload those as well. For the moment, Twitter, won’t allow people to send voice tweets as replies, which he says is a good thing.

I tend to agree with him as this is just starting out because of what he mentioned earlier about moderation. And I think that’s going to be a big challenge for Twitter to, uh, to address that and see how it does work. Um, One other comment I saw from Patrick Bay, I’m a podcaster who says, OMG, finally, in a tweet, he says, this Twitter is still our voice recordings in tweets.

It is cool in itself, but as a podcast. So this is super duper. Interesting. I agree with that show as a podcast, I was thinking precisely that when I saw this news a list of comments, um, Basically, that would be the main news I would see. Fuck. I see this as a very interesting development. I’m listening to what people say about the risks and there’s Twitter.

Get it right. It could be great if they don’t, then this is going to be interesting. Uh, uh, sorry that it’s only on iOS, that seems to limit the audience for this right now. Uh, and I have an iPhone. In fact, I was complaining about none of this on Android yet. Uh, and then I said, wait a minute. My work phones and iPhone.

And I went and looked and it’s not available to me yet. So it’s still rolling out. Uh, I read one other criticism I found, uh, interesting. And it was focusing on people with disabilities who can’t listen. To audio and, uh, the need for closed captions, which Twitter does provide for video. Uh, Twitter has already apologized for this, uh, and said that they’re exploring ways to make these types of tweets available to everyone.

But critics have said that response was tone deaf, uh, making. Accessible accessibility seemed like an afterthought at Twitter. A one lawyer wrote this in a tweet. He said the Americans with disabilities act was signed into law. 30 years ago. Federal law requires accessibility from the start. You don’t, as a matter of civil rights law, get to roll out an inaccessible feature.

And then only later. Make it accessible. Uh, Twitter has since come out and said, Oh, we’re also looking at manual and auto transcriptions of these, uh, voice tweets and how they can build a dedicated group to focus on accessibility, tooling, and advocacy across all products. So they’re scrambling to get beyond this particular criticism.

Uh, my. Skepticism, I think comes from the fact that Twitter is something I scroll through quickly. I tap on a link. If I want to read the article, somebody is referencing and I don’t know how many people are going to want to stop and take two minutes to listen to something on a tool where they’re used to scrolling and, and getting through stuff very, very quickly.

I mean, the whole point of Twitter was that they were micro, right. Uh, and obviously 120 or 140 seconds is not. A full podcast, but a lot longer than it takes to read 120 characters. Well, you’re right. And I think this is like all things. Is it not? If you’re interested enough in it, then you’re going to click or tap or whatever it is that you do a I’m thinking specifically now to comment on that though, if I’m a podcast, I would love to get people tweeting an audio comment directly.

So that will be interesting. Uh, others who aren’t in Azure are going to ignore it. Now, is this. Is this kind of option optionality as it were a suitable. Is it valid for an organization that’s investing with time effort? Energy and money in developing this extension of the service. If it is like, well, if you’re interested, you’ll use it.

If you’re not, you’ll ignore it. I mean that, but that’s, that tends to be the nature of a lot of their social media stuff these days. Does it not? So I think good for them. Uh, if you’re interested in it, you’ll pay attention to it. If you’re not, you won’t. Yeah. I think one group of Twitter users who will probably get a lot of use out of this is, is celebrities, um, celebrities, athletes, uh, that sort of person who has a fan base who actually wants to hear from them.

Uh, I think the average person out on Twitter, most people are going to go, why would I want to hear them when I can just read them as quickly, but you know, hearing from a rock star or a big movie star who’s out there tweeting now. Uh, probably easier to just talk. God forbid the president of the United States might start doing this.

Hopefully they’ll block him. I mean this about, I mean, I know there’s Jesse, you have an Android or an Apple. I don’t know. He’s on an iPhone. Yeah. But I know a couple of handfuls of folks who do. Literally what I call little soundbite recordings on SoundCloud. And it’s like a minute, um, some, two or three.

So, uh, that’s probably 200 and 140 seconds or whatever. And they could find this quite interesting because what they do is that the kind of news about their latest clip goes out on Twitter and a link to a SoundCloud file. So instead they can embed it straight in the tweet. And the folks who follow them for that kind of content may well, prefer that again, these are all options to me, as opposed to limitations, I think is terrific.

Sure. Yeah. One of the things that might happen if this really takes off is it’ll change the whole infrastructure of how people embed tweets. We’ve talked about this, the fact that newspaper reporters used to have to find the man on the street to do the interview now. Find the man on the street who tweeted about it and just embedded into the article online.

But if the end bed is, uh, a non closed captioned voice tweet, I think that’ll stop because they don’t want to interrupt the flow of the article. They want you to keep reading. The tweet is something you read, but if you stop and listen to somebody else’s audio content, I’m not sure that a lot of newspapers and other news outlets are gonna want to embed that.

No, they probably won’t, but there will be those who do I could see it. Um, Being again, this is the first stages of it. The experimental Twitter will evolve it, that issue you mentioned about, um, uh, you know, or the audio impaired people that say they’ll solve that they will are the biggest issue that I tend to agree with.

The critics I’m seeing all over the place is the moderation thing. Uh, you know, we talk about Trump, for instance, you need the moderate, his stuff. That’s the fact, but it’d be that I’m thinking seriously about bad people, very, very evil people who will use this tool, like others, like other tools to do bad things.

You got to watch out for that. Well, if it’s automatically closed captioned and you get the text of the tweet that should make moderation easier, it will be easier to identify those. Well, the thing that I also read about that, so that’s a good point is that moderation does require if you’re going to do it, I would imagine if you’re going to really seriously do moderation of audio, you’re gonna have to listen to the audio.

There are AI tools that will help you, but probably at the end of the day, it’s going to have to be a human being to make a kind of decision. And you can’t do this over like a, you know, a 20 minute period. This has gotta be pretty quick. So that’s something to solve. Big challenge. I’d say. Oh, the presentation I gave at the IBC conference in order to make an hour and 15 minute presentation, a little more interesting.

Uh, I asked three colleagues to record short videos to explain why communicators should be interested in. Emerging technologies where they have expertise. Dan York did a great video on live streaming, and in fact, he showed people, uh, he was using OBS, uh, the live streaming and recording studio software, uh, that allows you to multicast right.

You can be streaming to YouTube and, uh, Facebook and LinkedIn all at the same time. And, uh, he explained why that’s. Important, uh, Christopher S Penn knocked it out of the park with a video on artificial intelligence. And Phil Gomez did a great presentation on blockchain. Now, each of these were only four or five minutes, uh, but really provided context with voices of people who understood these technologies.

Well, Uh, just before the presentation, Phil got in touch with me and asked if there was time for me to update my presentation, which of course there was not. I said why? And he said, well, blockchain as a communication tool has just blown up in the last week. And there were three announcements. The big one was the New York times publishing details about what it calls its news provenance project.

This is a prototype that uses blockchain to surface a new photos, contextual information on a simulated social media feed. Now, according to the product manager, Pooja ready, uh, writing in a blog post. We wanted to see whether visible contextual information such as the photographer’s name and the location depicted in the photo could help readers better discern the credibility of news photos in their social feeds.

Now for the trial, the time said it built a network of test news organizations, as well as a social media platform that would link them. Uh, the organizations had shared ownership of a distributed ledger. Blockchain and a database between them and could make changes to photo metadata in the database. The end result a ready said when testing our prototype with users, we found that it effectively helped them make informed judgments about photos in a social media feed.

And you know that there haven’t been instances where photos have been shared saying, this is what was going on at this event. And it turns out it’s a three year old photo from another event and another. Location, this would help. Resolve that problem. Uh, the second bit of blockchain news came out of a domain registrar called unstoppable domains, and they’re allowing the owners of the dot crypto domain, uh, to launch decentralized blogs or what they’re calling D blogs.

These can be built. Quickly, uh, and the posts and everything else that accompanies them like videos and images are decentralized on the interplanetary file system. That’s IP Fs, a blockchain based network that would prevent autocratic nations and others from shutting down your content. You are in complete control of your content.

Uh, there are already several blogs up using the system. I was enjoying reading one called Melton’s musings. I’ll have a link to that in the show notes. Uh, and the third announcement Microsoft launched its decentralized identifiers network on Bitcoin’s blockchain. Uh, it’s called ion I O N it lets users create decentralized digital credentials like driver’s licenses or university diplomas, uh, that could be used to identify them online.

Presumably you would be able to show your phone at a bar and get in because you’re 21. Uh, but I think it would also be usable to show that somebody who’s published something is who they say they are. Uh, you could also use these to log onto websites and apps, which means that I’m needing to have a password might go away or go away more than it already has.

Um, but being able to identify, uh, who wrote what in an article or a video could wind up being huge, especially in this era of deep fakes anyway, after hearing a bunch of chatter over the last year or so about how blockchain was an over-hyped bust, you know, we’re really now starting to see actual movement, the communicators should be paying attention to.

Yeah, those are very interesting examples, shell. I particularly like that last one. You talked about the, the idea of the identifier, although. In my mind, the first thought that pops up of course is safeguarding privacy and data. How, what are the implications for a user privacy data security, um, safeguarding data protecting and making sure it’s not used for wrong purposes, uh, storage of it, all those things.

Um, So this, I haven’t read the article. I have to say, well, Microsoft says that you are always in control of your identity. Um, yeah. So how, how did you know to me it’s like, so how’s it going to work exactly in that case? How would I be in control? But about to me, that’s something that needs to be worked through.

It’s terrific that that’s such a technology. Is within reach of, of doing some of the things they say it would be able to, because you’re right there, being able to prove who you are in a way that’s verifiable by a trusted third party. And therein is the trick. Uh, you know, this says who you are according to who.

So, how do you set that up in a trusted way? That’s something or someone or a tool or a technology verified your identity. So do you trust that? So there’s quite a chain there too, to kind of get get right. But. Absolutely that that’s one of the things that communicators do need to be paying attention to as these things do evolve.

So good examples. I think I’m most excited about the New York times initiative. I think the idea of being able to see the Providence of a photo in a social media feed, uh, would probably wind up leading to fewer people, actually sharing those kinds of images. If they know they’re going to be called out the first time somebody looks at one of those.

No, this isn’t what you’re saying. It is, uh, why bother, uh, it, it could clean up some of those feeds. Yeah. Anything that makes that process trustworthy, I think is great. That’s what this can do. Fantastic. Plus a course, make it seamless and dead easy. Cause right now to do that is Ooh, it’s clicks galore. Uh, and it’s, it takes a while.

So you tend not to, so there’s blind trust in, in, in. And images in particular. So, you know, some of this is a really good idea, I have to say. Yeah. And the other problem is of course, when it’s revealed that the photo is not of what the person sharing, it says it is very few of the people who have seen it as it was shared on social media, get that word.

They haven’t seen that news report. Right? This means everybody who looks at that image in a social media feed would know. Good examples. I have to say. So, um, do you use Flipboard? I wonder, um, it’s been around for a while and the one way to describe Flipboard is a service that lets you curate content in extremely.

Compelling attractive and, uh, useful, uh, audio, visual formats, primarily visual. So you can create a magazine digital of course, that, uh, I see, I pay a lot of attention to what organizations in particular doing this. I’ve been using Flipboard for some years. Uh, I, I’m not typical. I doubt, although I see lots doing what I do in the sense that I use these mostly for my own personal interests.

But I do follow quite a number of, uh, magazine, Flipboard magazines, um, created by organizations to showcase brands, uh, thoughts, uh, activities, you name it. Uh, and many of which I find in themselves interesting, but also the way in which they’ve been put together, uh, and, uh, shared. So that’s been around a while and, and I often wonder why I don’t see more people using Flipboard.

It’s not, instead of something was enhanced, something presents content in a very compelling way to many who would, it would appeal to. So. News just the other day as reported a number of plates I saw at first on tech crunch about, um, a new product that a Flipboard is, um, is rolling out. Uh, I found quite interesting.

So they’re giving news publishers and others. Content curators on the platform, a new way to highlight content through a format called storyboards. So Flipboard is all about what they call smart magazines, which really are ongoing collections. So it’s a periodical that mixes, um, as a tech crunch succinctly describes it, human and algorithmic.

Curation allowing readers to dive deeply into and keep up to date on a given topic. Storyboards on the other hand are more of a one time collection of articles, videos, podcasts, tweets, and other media content wise. They may not be that different from everything needs to know about X kind of article, but they give publishers and easy and visually stylish way to put those rabbits together.

According to tech crunch, many publishers have already been beta testing. It. Uh, including tech crunch, who did, um, daily roundups of coverage, uh, coming out of last year’s disrupt conference in San Francisco, they quote a number of other interesting examples of people experimenting with this. Um, uh, a publication called the Agrio created a storyboard, collecting the latest coverage of George Floyd’s death.

I took a look at that and they’re all in one place, uh, with a perspective from the creator. A is a huge amount of content connected in a way that is not the same as how the media or, or separately reporting it. Interesting. A national geographic, you rated the package of new and old stories, commemorating the 40th anniversary of the eruption of Mount st.

Helens. They had an interesting twist on how they presented it because it was connected to a link to a pay wall to sign up to a subscription. So if you found the imagery compelling, that may result in that interesting, I felt what they were doing with it. Um, Tech crunch spoke to Flipboard CEO, Mike McCue, who said, this is something curators have been asking for, uh, to structure that curation, uh, better.

He said that storyboards could be a great way to highlight different products and make money with affiliate links, especially as curated commerce is something that will probably play more and more of a significant role in our revenue. He said, Uh, it’s, uh, it’s most interesting, um, that they, tech crunch talks about, uh, what comes with it, which will appeal.

I’m sure to people interested in looking at this detailed analytics you get about how many people are viewing your storyboards. If they’re liking them, are they commenting on them, flipping them via Flipboard, for instance, and much more. It’s all part of a new tool. Called curator pro that Flipboard is rolling out, uh, that lets them do more from their content, including curation tools and analytics.

So lots of coming with this, I think if I were a brand with a story to tell, I’d be looking at storyboards as another. Way of telling that story. Yeah, I absolutely would. I have a couple of magazines that I curate on Flipboard. I have to confess that I haven’t curated them in so long that when I tried to log into Flipboard this morning, it told me they had new security protocols and I needed to re up account.

And I haven’t had a chance to do that, but it’s a gorgeous platform. It always has been. Um, I think I’ve kind of moved to nuzzle for a lot of. What Flipboard does, but Flipboard looks much better. What appeals to me about this? This is their own unique take on a story type of approach and Instagram stories.

Uh, obviously they don’t vanish the whole idea of Instagram stories and Snapchat stories and Facebook stories is, is that these are ephemeral, uh, that once you’ve seen them, they’re gone. And they’re only up there for. 24 hours. Uh, but it’s still taking that approach to, in addition to my regular stuff, I’m going to share with you in this story format.

Uh, and I think it reinforces the reason that we in this profession should be leveraging stories in every way these platforms make available. Yeah, well, it’s worth looking into, so flipboard.com is the place to go and you can find everything it needs to know there. Breeding shell and Evelyn, if our listeners all around the world, it’s Dan York from extremely hot verb, Shelburne Vermont, right now, we’re going through a heat wave, which is appropriate for a summer solstice, I suppose, which is what we have here.

It’s June 20th, the longest day of the year in the Northern hemisphere, which is actually an interesting way to talk about lenses, because the perspective we have is the context is how we talk about things. Right. We talk about the longest day of the year, and we talk about the summer solstice, but that’s of course a Northern hemisphere perspective.

If we were in the South, we would be talking about the shortest day of the year, which is a long way to say, look at this. It says a lot about the language we use and yesterday was June 10th here in the, uh, United States. Which celebrates the time when a union general or a union Colonel actually made it to Galveston, Texas to inform slaves there that they have been made free by the emancipation proclamation two years earlier.

There’s a longer story around all that, but an interesting perspective on a webinar I was listening to yesterday was to say that a lot of that has to do with the perspective coming from the union, from the white view, et cetera, and is, is different from the perspective that would be had by of course, the, uh, the black slaves and the, and the aspects around that in their case, they’d actually been working for two more years as slaves then they had not.

Um, it’s a very interesting way to. Think about how, what is the lens through which we are talking about? Things we, as communicators of course, are always thinking about lenses perspectives, but it’s just interesting to look at what are we doing, which goes to a topic I want to talk about. There’s been a lot of discussion with everything happening here in the United States, in particular, but around the world with black lives matter and so much more around language and how we move to using more inclusive language.

Get hub, which is one of the major places around the world for software development has taken a look at some of the language that’s used there. For instance, when you’re doing something, get hub, you use the master repository, and it’s part of a move where people are looking at some language like master, slave relationships and things and saying.

Maybe there’s a better way to do that. Similarly, things like using black lists or white lists for in the security world or talking about man in the middle of tax, when we could talk about machine in the middle or something like that. My question for all of you as communicators is what are you doing to look at the inclusiveness of the language you are using?

If you haven’t been thinking about that, a couple of links and maybe think about that a little bit. I want to talk an arrest report about the giants that are happening out there in the battle of podcasting from the run of show. I know you shall never have talked about Twitter and there are 140 seconds of audio.

They’re now letting it go. But some of the other big players, Spotify, which bought anchor just recently announced that you can now go and start uploading video files directly into anchor. So you could be having a video chat over zoom or Skype or Google Hangouts or whatever else you can get that recorded video.

And then you could just upload it into anchor and it will strip out the audio and give that to you in an editable form so that you could be able to go and take that and put it directly into your, into your podcast that you run through anchor. Now this again, Spotify who is really trying to become this, I mean, is this giant and podcasting space is, is providing this ability.

You could have this video chat and then just make it easy to get it in there. Now what’s interesting is the other player in the music space, Pandora. Is looking to now get into the podcasting game in a bigger way specifically, they’re now providing better sets of podcast analytics. So you can learn more about where listeners are coming from and so much more.

You need to be part of their free Pandora for podcasters program, which means you need to go in, submit your RSS feed, et cetera, but they’re now getting into play and what’s. Interesting is Pandora is actually owned by Sirius XM. And they’re a little bit of an irony here, right? Because a serious thought that the world would just embrace satellite radio and, and many people have, but podcasts came along and seriously disrupted what was going on with all of the things there.

So. But serious has gotten in with Pandora within the music. And now it’s expanding into that and they directly acquired a company called simple cast, which allows you to go and publish, monitor, track podcasts, et cetera. And so they’ve gotten into that game and, uh, and their, their view is at least from the CEO says.

Most podcasts advertising is very rudimentary and not personalized. Frankly, this area is ripe to be disrupted and improved to which I say, well, that assumes, we want to have ads rather than being why we perhaps left radio for podcasts, but maybe this is just why we can’t have nice things, but stay tuned because Sirius is looking to get into that space.

A lot more Amazon of course, is also a big player in this space and, or wants to be. And they’re now looking to go and buy new content and run it as audible originals. You know, there’s some speculation. They made start to change their business model on audible and start to allow individual shows. They’re also looking to go and push out more podcasts through their Amazon music app.

Apparently they will be adding podcasts as a genre there. So, you know, trying to go up against Google and Apple and all of the space, but speaking of music and Amazon. They also have their Twitch service, which interestingly I’m streaming this out actually through Twitch as I record this, but Twitch is getting into music in a big way.

They’ve uh, it said one story said that in may people spent almost 27 million hours watching live music and other performing arts on Twitch. Um, and, and really looking at how to go and do this and, and enable creators to do that. Amazon’s also going to be streaming UK premier league games on that. So again, if you’re not paying attention to what Amazon’s doing with Twitch and with streaming and audio, you need to, you need to look at that.

Speaking of. Well music and Twitch and streaming and videos and giants, tick tock recently revealed information about how videos wind up on the, for you page, which is if you’ve never worked with tick talk, it’s when you get in there there’s videos that are suggested to you. So if you’re a communicator wondering how to make.

You know, your video work on tick talk. It’s interesting to read about the algorithm and see what’s going on in there because they’ve got a whole number of ways. What they’re doing is they show it to a small number of people and they watch what happens and then they start to go. And, and those are the signals that go in and show what’s there.

Very interesting to read. If you’re thinking about getting into more with tick tock. Speaking of signals, the big news coming out of Google this past May 28th, was that starting in 2021. They are going to be. Incorporating something called core web vitals, which are set of metrics around speed, responsiveness, visual stability, okay.

Which are going to help measure user experience. This is important. This is going to affect the search engine ranking of your content and your websites. So you need to pay attention to is understand it what’s going on because these will be ranking signals starting in 2021. Read more about that and all of that.

That’s all I want to talk about today. Many more things I’d like to talk about, but best wishes to everyone as we continue to work through this pandemic and in sort of the reopening as we’re going through there, I’d remind people that there’s a lot of people looking to understand how to do virtual events and we in the communication space have a lot of ideas around that.

So, thanks again for listening. You can find more of my audio writing at Dan York dot Emmy and back to you shall Neville. Bye for now. Thanks, Dan, always a great report, loved all the conversation about podcasting. And I have to confess that, uh, I am, uh, conflicted, uh, over the moves that are going on right now.

On the one hand, I’m glad to see the mainstreaming of podcasting. Uh, on the other hand, the idea that some of the podcasts that people might like to listen to are now behind a pay wall, and you have to subscribe to a particular surface to hear them. Uh, I don’t care for that. That seems to be contradictory to the original intent of podcasting, which was available to anybody.

Right. All you needed was access to the RSS feed, but I’m really good report. Thanks Dan. Uh, we’ve told stories like this one before, in fact, back in, uh, I think it was 2017, we told the story of a kid who sent a letter to Lego. Um, his dad had told him, don’t take this with us shopping because you lose it.

Uh, and of course he lost, it, wrote a letter to Lego to see if they’d replace it. And, uh, the letter is available on the web. You can look this up. Um, in fact, I’ll even put a link to it in the show notes. Uh, but it said normally we would ask that you pay for a new one. If you lose, uh, your own mini figures and need to have it replaced, my boss has told me I couldn’t send you a new one out for free because you lost it.

I decided I would put a call into sensei Wu to see if he could help me. And he goes on from there. The co the consumer services rep said that sensei Wu said the kid’s dad was a wise man. Uh, and, uh, he would send him an upgraded version of the figure that combined three different figures in one, and the bad guy for him to fight.

And of course this went absolutely viral. Uh, an example of what happens when you listen. To a customer and look for opportunities to engage and take action. And that’s the kind of story that happened earlier this month. Uh, another story of a company listening to a customer in this case, uh, it’s a Missouri woman named, uh, Kennedy Mitchum, uh, a black woman, a recent college graduate who was troubled by the definition of racism in Merriam Webster.

Um, she emailed Merriam Webster to let them know how she felt about it. Uh, their definition of racism by the way, was a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities. And that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race. Mitcham didn’t believe that went.

Far enough, the 22 year old was also concerned that people frequently turn to the dictionary to argue that something isn’t racist because the dictionary requires a personal dislike of someone based on their race for that to qualify as racism. Uh, this email found its way to Peter Sokoloski editor at large at Merriam Webster, who agreed that the entry hadn’t been revised in decades and that the new definition would be an improvement in the wording.

We have concluded that omitting any mention of the systemic aspects of racism promotes a certain viewpoint in itself. It also does a disservice to readers of all races. He told the New York times activism doesn’t change. The dictionary. Activism changes the language. Uh, so they are changing the definition of racism to include the systemic race of the fact that this perception of one race as being better than another is used to, uh, put one race in power over the other and disadvantage the other.

I love this story on a number of levels, but as a communicator, I love that someone actually read an email. I mean, how many emails must they get? And then they were smart enough to pass it along to someone who is smart enough to see its value and do something with it. And of course now it’s made news everywhere.

Listening has never been more important as a communication activity. This is just another great example of a company that knew how to do that. And by the way, if you’re not following Merriam Webster on Twitter, do yourself a favor. It’s a great Twitter account. That’s an interesting story. Shall I agree with you?

Uh, I also wonder though, um, if Marion Wister Webster is changing the definition of racism, what happens if you go and visit another dictionary and you find it’s a different definition. So I wonder the same thing. Is she going to email the OED? Yeah. Yeah, although, uh, that is interesting in terms of, you know, how many versions of the truth are out there.

If you’ve seen the dictionary as the kind of source of authority and honesty in a particular topic, um, that’s a good story. It actually connects very well. I think to our next story, which is about George Floyd, except it’s not really about Joyce Floyd. This is actually a good example of something that I believe is, is, is a, such an issue these days, which is Wikipedia, um, is.

Uh, a place that is a primary source. People go to people, generally speaking, wherever you are in the world, you search for something. And, uh, the odds are pretty high, uh, in the nineties and eight plus percent area. I’d say that amongst the first or second screen full of search results, you’re going to get is an Wikipedia entry for that phrase or that person or that event or whatever it might be.

George Floyd is no example. And this example of this to me, And the focus of this report is such a key issue today. It’s it? It merits, uh, talking about a bit. So what this is about, what I’m going to mention is, is, uh, the awful thing that happened leading to this man’s death on may the 25th. So it’s very current, uh, and how it’s, it’s, uh, kind of the focus of a humongous battleground on Wikipedia, uh, with different points of view, all centered around.

The notion of neutrality, uh, we compete here, stands itself, proud in supporting that, uh, ideal that the content is a neutral point of view, and it is something that is inherently trustworthy because of the fact that it is curated by such a huge number of people, uh, who try to approach this, uh, with, uh, objectivity and neutrality, uh, at the, at the heart of what they do.

Following a huge, huge, uh, quantity of procedures, rules, and accepted practices that are actually very hard to navigate. When you first encountered this something I’ve been involved in myself in my work, uh, over the last six months on a project on Wikipedia. So, um, this, I found interesting this story show it’s it’s it’s, uh, it’s reported on slate.

Uh, the writer, Steven Harrison, Harrison’s a lengthy report on slate. So I’m not going to attempt to read it or even paraphrase it. I’m only going to quote from some of it, because to me it’s a significant, so, um, The headline, how Wikipedia became a battleground for racial justice, I think is a good one.

And the subhead contributors are rethinking. What Wikipedia is committed to neutrality actually means it starts off with quoting the current Wikipedia article. On the killing of George Floyd. And the key thing here to mention is the word current, because when this was written, uh, his article in slate and published a, about a week or so back, uh, that was current, but one of the natures of Wikipedia is that is only current as you’re looking at it, things change particularly, uh, an event like this.

So it describes what happened to George Floyd. And, um, since that event, A Wikipedia is editors have documented over 460 George Lee, Floyd protests in both the us and abroad. So, uh, editors, and they can be anybody by the way, anyone can edit Wikipedia as it proudly proclaims when he first, uh, land on the homepage.

If you ever go there, uh, that, um, uh, there are ways to do it though, but I won’t go into that cause that take up the rest of the podcast, talking about that, but anyone can do it and you’re a volunteer editor. And so you can write anything and that’s, what’s been happening. People are passionate, uh, many are able to articulate well that that, that tries to be neutral.

But the interesting thing to me is, is as, um, as the article slate by Steven Harrison continues a bit, uh, the updating, uh, such as these. Extra, uh, pages that have been created are the result of Wikipedia is high tempo and decentralized editing process, which gives the internet encyclopedia its extraordinary ability to create and revise content.

Following current events, knowledge, production, at least in the Wikipedia sense is part collaboration and part combat is exactly how I’ve seen it as well. Editors undo one another’s contributions. If they disagree. And then tensely debate proposed changes on the talk page, sitting behind each article in case anyone listening doesn’t realize that a Wikipedia entry.

In other words, a page with an article is the live face that it presents the topic behind that as, as this connects. There’s a talk page. Yeah. Which is where anyone can add a comment, either questioning something or offering a suggestion to change it or whatever it’s a place. Uh, you, you would like to think is a place for civilized discourse.

It is about discourse. Sometimes it’s civilized, but passions run high on, on a number of topics. Take a look at any topics interest you, and you’ll see what I mean. If you look at the talk page. So, um, so people debate these changes on talk pages and with the recent coverage of George Floyd and other victims of police brutality, those debates have often centered on the proper interpretation of what is neutrality.

So neutral point of view is one of Wikipedia core content policies. As I mentioned earlier, it’s often been described as non negotiable. To the extent possible the site’s content is to be written without editorial bias so that it retains encyclopedic character. Last week, the community of editors voted against the proposal to quote blackout the site in support of black lives matters.

If you remember that that was a Tuesday or just over a week. You actually, I think it was shell, the community of editors voted against it. Um, uh, and in part it was due to concerns that it could threaten Wikipedia reputation for neutrality. So it would take a stand, uh, on one side of the debate. And that’s not something that they like to do.

A lot of critics argue that Wikipedia already done that. So what’s the difference. So that debate is still ongoing, quite passionately. I have noted. Um, Harrison goes into a lot of detail here about how editors are working together. Uh, what, what, uh, how they discuss this concept of neutrality. It is defined quite quickly, uh, clearly on Wikipedia.

I found it easy to understand that. But, uh, as Harrison notes, neutrality has also become a flashpoint in debates about language and specifically the names of articles themselves. Editors voted by consensus to change the article death of George Floyd, to killing of George Floyd on June. The second, a few editors suggested that.

Death was the more neutral sounding term, but more editors reasoned that killing was the more factually accurate term. And that the most accurate description was neutral. By definition, that same day, there was a proposal to rename the killing of George Floyd, page two murder of George Floyd, but that was closed by one of the administrators there on procedural grounds.

And that debate is still going on behind the scenes over on the biographical Wikipedia entry for George Floyd. Editors are debating, whether it should mention his prior criminal charges. Those in favor of mentioning Floyd’s prior arrests argue that Wikipedia is not censored. Those opposed argue that highlighting this past on the page will afford that information undue weight since his criminal activity had no relevance to his killing on May 25th.

In the meantime, visitors to the George Floyd biographical page can see the suggestion to merge this entry. Into the killing of George Floyd article via a clear notice at the top of the page. So that debate continues a pace. Some Wikipedians take issue with the word you trust yourself, and this adds serious complexity to this argument.

That group includes Jackie Kerner, a social scientist who specializes on online communities and the free knowledge movement. She explained that she preferred the word balanced to neutrality, and that one of Wikipedia girls should be knowledge. Equity, the just representation of knowledge and people when dedicated user groups like black lives matter, contribute content about racial justice.

They’re helping Wikipedia identify historical

06/20/20 | 0 Comments | FIR #196: Speak Up, Twitter

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