Scoble’s Excited About Apple Event; Sounds Old Fashioned to Me

I don’t want to necessarily accuse Robert Scoble of being an Apple fanboy, but I’m having a hard time coming up with any other explanation after reading his posts about attending the Apple press event today.  He made a post last night in anticipation, where I commented that I didn’t understand his excitement since press-only conferences are very un-social media.

Today he posts his recap of the event.  He notes that Apple disallowed photography.  Jobs would only do interviews on paper (no video).  No wifi.

Apple might make sexy products, but when it comes to marketing and PR they’re about as old-fashioned as it gets.  They’ll feed you the “official” story and do everything in their power to prevent any “unauthorized” coverage.

Putting it another way: if you want to cover an Apple event, you can’t really do it with an iPhone.

I have no real explanation why a company who handles the press in this manner is constantly lauded by social media geeks.

[tags]apple, pressconferences, media, socialmedia, scoble, robertscoble[/tags]

Wanting to be Happy with the Oregonian’s Blog

I really want to be happy with the Oregonian and their online blogging efforts and “breaking” news presented in a blog format.  Their current offerings are far superior to the horrendous nightmare that used to be their website.

That said, they’re still preventing participation.  I won’t register just to post a blog comment.  Why should I spend my time and give away personal information when I get nothing in return?  Hence, they’ve lost me as a participant.  The information that I could’ve posted to add value to their story will not appear on their site.

[tags]oregonian, oregonlive, blogging, blogcomments[/tags]

Another Social News Site: Celebrity Gossip

Digg started it but now everyone’s doing it, and there’s now a social news site related to keeping track of what’s going on with the latest celebrity scandal. The site is called Celebrity Gossip, and it lets viewers see all of the latest news about their favorite celebrity stars and then vote on which news stories get featured on the “Hot” segment of the site. What sets the site apart is that each story is tagged with the celebrity name, so in addition to seeing the newest or most popular stories, you can go to the “Celebrity” tab on the site and look up stories relating to a particular individual.  It’s a nice additional feature to narrow down the articles.

(this is a sponsored blog post)

Sexism at KGW?

One can’t help but observe that if it had been a male deputy, we wouldn’t have seen the opposite headline.  Instead we get KGW blaring: “Female officer shoots, kills knife-yielding suspect“. 

[tags]kgw, portland, pdx, media, sexism, news[/tags]