Christopher S. Penn – Marketing AI Keynote Speaker

Author: Christopher S Penn

  • Block Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows Spoilers on Twitter with Pipes

    A few friends have expressed concern that some spoilers from Harry Potter 7 would find their way to Twitter. After all, the book is already available (illegally) for download online, and lots of spoilers are floating around everywhere. For fans who want to remain unspoiled, a media blackout may seem like the only option, even on “friend” networks like Twitter. Happily, you don’t have to go dark on Twitter entirely – just use Yahoo Pipes to filter out spoilers.

    If you want to remain unspoiled, switch to reading Twitter only on Google Reader, but filter it through Yahoo Pipes first with these settings:

    Block Harry Potter spoilers with Pipes

    This will eliminate most of the keywords that would be used in a spoiler. Obviously, tweak and add your own.

    1. Copy your Twitter RSS feed URL (it’s at the bottom of your twitter list)
    2. Paste into Yahoo Pipes Feed Source.
    3. Add a filter.
    4. Block any items containing the terms you specify. I recommend a list of characters like Voldemort, Hermione, Severus Snape, Harry Potter, etc. as well as terms like spoiler, spoilers, preview, plot summary, etc.
    5. Copy the exported RSS feed to your Google Reader.
    6. Use an applet like TwitterPost or Twitter from the command line to send Tweets without having to read the Twitterstream.

    Good luck, and good reading!

  • Starry Night in Second Life

    Hat tip to Mitch Joel and CC Chapman for this wonder.

    [youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxVDVggLqsA[/youtube]

  • Truth hurts.

    Lower 9th Ward, New Orleans - 2007

    Close your eyes when you don’t want to see
    Stay at home when you don’t want to go
    Only speak to those who will agree
    Yeah, and close your mind when you don’t want to know

    – Billy Joel, “Everybody Loves You Now”

    This is a picture of the Lower 9th Ward of New Orleans, captured by Europa in 2007. Despite nearly 2 years since Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, little progress is being made in fairly large sections of New Orleans.

    For perspective, how large is this region of the city? About 1.6 miles by 1.2 miles, or just under two square miles. If it were Manhattan, it’d be the same area from West 53rd to 19th and from 10th Avenue to Lexington Avenue – or most of midtown. If it were Boston, it’d be from Government Center to Kenmore Square and from the Charles River to Jamaica Plain – most of the western part of the city. Know San Francisco? The Lower 9th Ward of New Orleans is almost identical in size to all of Golden Gate National Park. Know DC? It’s the same area as the Lincoln Memorial to the Smithsonian by the Lincoln to Dupont Circle. Been to Disney World? The Lower 9th is the same size as the Magic Kingdom – plus Epcot, MGM, and the Animal Kingdom.

    This is a large chunk of a major American city that has not been rebuilt.

    Think about it.

  • 41% of Americans believe Saddam = 9/11, 6 years later

    Warning: political post ahead. If you don’t enjoy politics (I was a PoliSci major for my undergraduate degree), skip this post!

    At his press conference Thursday, the president characterized the current state of war in Iraq as a showdown with Al Qaeda and warned that withdrawal would risk “mass killings on a horrific scale.” Critics have called his assertions that the organization is responsible for both the violence in Iraq and the 2001 attacks on the U.S. an oversimplification. Last month’s poll found that 41 percent of Americans still believe Saddam Hussein’s regime was directly involved in financing, planning or carrying out the attacks on 9/11, even though no evidence has surfaced to support a connection.) The NEWSWEEK Poll, conducted June 18-19, has a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points for questions based on Census Current Population Survey parameters for gender, age, education, race and population density. In conducting the poll, Princeton Survey Research Associates International interviewed 1,001 adults aged 18 and older. – MSNBC

    Someone ring the proctologist, because 41% of the Americans that MSNBC polls have their heads stuck in their recta.

    Even President Bush himself has said that there’s no connection whatsoever.

    “No, we’ve had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with September the 11th.” – President Bush, September 13, 2003.

    No matter your political persuasion, please, someone find this 41% – or at least the 411 people selected by Princeton Survey Research Associates – and slap some reality into them.

    Of course, this is the same country that produces these dazzling results:

    After more than three years of combat and nearly 2,400 U.S. military deaths in Iraq, nearly two-thirds of Americans aged 18 to 24 still cannot find Iraq on a map, a study released Tuesday showed.

    The study found that less than six months after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, 33 percent could not point out Louisiana on a U.S. map.

    Inside the United States, “half or fewer of young men and women 18-24 can identify the states of New York or Ohio on a map [50 percent and 43 percent, respectively],” the study said.

    When the poll was conducted in 2002, “Americans scored second to last on overall geographic knowledge, trailing Canada, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Japan and Sweden,” the report said.

    The National Geographic-Roper Public Affairs 2006 Geographic Literacy Study paints a dismal picture of the geographic knowledge of the most recent graduates of the U.S. education system. – CNN

    Whatever we decide to do as a nation with inexpensive laptops for students, someone please install Google Earth on every single one of them, and a quiz module, too.

  • Free movie tickets from the Start Cooking Team

    Julien Smith messaged me this afternoon to let me know that StartCooking.com is offering free sneak preview tickets to No Reservations, starring Catherine Zeta Jones, on July 24th at 8 PM. You must make your reservations no later than Monday, July 16. Want to go?

    Free movie tickets from the Start Cooking Team 1

  • I Hate You, Wal-Mart, For What You Have Done to America's Mind

    In chatting with Marketing Over Coffee co-host John Wall, I reached a conclusion with him: Wal-Mart has unleashed an incredibly destructive force on America, one which is tearing the country to bits.

    Lowest price mentality.

    In sales, we usually talk about three dimensions of a product:

    – Quality
    – Service
    – Price

    Generally speaking, you want a balance among the three. Ideally, you want the finest quality, best service, and lowest price you can get, but you make tradeoffs and concessions in some areas for others.

    What Wal-Mart has done is caused a deep imbalance by promoting lowest price as the only factor that matters in a product or service, so much so that people are willing to accept garbage quality and abusive service as long as the price is as low as they can get it.

    Is Wal-Mart the cause of this mentality? No, but it’s been the biggest cheerleader with its Always Low Prices campaign.

    John and I were discussing airlines. US airline carriers compete virtually solely on price, and that’s resulted in, as John calls it, airlines being transformed from amazing travel experiences to “a Grayhound with wings, complete with smelly seats”.

    Here’s a stunning thought for you: what if Wal-Mart were responsible for digital piracy? What if Wal-Mart were the reason that musicians and independent software developers have a harder time than ever earning a living? After all, if lowest price is the absolute most important thing in the world to you, free is even better – even if it means breaking the law and violating intellectual property rights.

    A relentless focus on getting things as cheaply as possible means that you as a consumer don’t care about much of anything else. If you’re willing to wear clothing that falls apart in six months, willing to eat unsafe food grown thousands of miles away by the lowest wage workers a supplier can find (legally or not), buy a DVD player that’s held together with duct tape and a prayer, why wouldn’t you download everything you could get your hands on, especially when the likelihood of getting caught is very low?

    When do you pay for quality? Or do you mercilessly always choose price as the defining factor in your purchasing decisions? Will you break the law to save money, knowing that most likely, you won’t get caught?

    What will you do for low prices?

  • PodCamp New Orleans!

    Tentative logo for PodCamp New OrleansAfter a great discussion, the unanimous vote is for a PodCamp New Orleans, so we’re beginning the process of organizing and building this event. The domain names, podcampneworleans.com and podcampneworleans.org were bought tonight – like most PodCamps, we’ll use the .org and redirect the .com name. Next steps:

    1. Create the organizing team. Who wants to be an organizer and help make this event a reality? Ideally, the organizing team will be more than 50% local New Orleans residents.
    2. Create the fundraising team. This is a departure from standard PodCamp procedure. Reasons for this will become clear shortly.
    3. Select a date. We’ll rely heavily on local organizers for this.
    4. Select a venue. We’ll rely heavily on local organizers for this.
    5. Get attendees.
    6. Get sponsors.
    7. Have the event.

    The major departure from your standard PodCamp is the fundraising team, which is independent of the organizers. The goal for PodCamp New Orleans is going to be to raise a large pile of cash, and instead of reinvesting it in a future PodCamp or sending it back to the PodCamp Foundation, any leftover funds remaining will go to relief efforts as selected by both the organizing and fundraising teams. It will be good to bring new media’s storytellers to the area to tell the stories that aren’t being told. It will be better to bring new media and a war chest that can make real, tangible change.

    If you’re interested in being a member of either team, please comment this post with your name and what team you want to be on. We’ll get the web site, registration, and other stuff up and running soon.

  • Podcasting Goes Mainstream

    Podcasting has gone mainstream.

    How do I know?

    Sunday morning televangelists are encouraging viewers to subscribe to their podcasts.

    Podcasting goes mainstream

    Welcome to the revolution, guys and gals.

  • How PodCamp Led to Sex

    … or more accurately, the Sex 2.0 UnConference being organized by Amber Rhea. I’m very psyched to see Amber take the lessons she earned from PodCamp Atlanta and apply the UnConference model to a completely different industry and a completely different genre. Here’s hoping it is as wildly successful as the PodCamp UnConference series is. Somehow I don’t think that’s going to be a problem.

  • PodCamp New Orleans?

    When you think of New Orleans, what do you think of?

    Jazz?

    Great food?

    Or a city that was destroyed by a hurricane and willfully ignored by a nation afterwards?

    Chris Johnston has sparked talk about having a PodCamp in New Orleans. I can’t think of a better location for a major event like PodCamp than a city like New Orleans, because New Media professionals are storytellers, and there are more stories in New Orleans than in almost any other major American city.

    We know when people visit New Orleans – Mardi Gras. After I survive PodCamp Boston 2, I’d love to participate in organizing something in the birthplace of jazz, right around the time people are visiting anyway.

    Are you in?

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