Is There Still a Place for Discretion?
So this is kind of weird.
There has been a big flap over at Techcrunch regarding how they select the hot start up companies they cover. Basically, Techcrunch wrote an article about a company called Maya’s Mom and did not cover one of its competitors, Mother’s Click. The folks at Mother’s Milk got angry and accused Techcrunch of writing about Maya’s Mom due solely to a personal relationship Techcrunch’s Mike Arrington has with the founder of the company.
You can read the original article from Techcrunch’s Mike Arrington about the situation here and a follow up post here.
But what’s really interesting is that Mother’s Milk’s PR firm, SHIFT Communications, has posted a thinly veiled entry absolving themselves of responsibility for the situation. They explain that the client is to blame for the situation.
It sounds like they are right and that the client is to blame here. But still.
As a consultant myself, I can say with absolute certainty that I wouldn’t have made the post that SHIFT Communications made. I just don’t think the post serves any purpose beyond making the client look bad and the PR firm look good.
Am I a dinosaur? Is this sort of openness by consultants the future? I tend to think there is still a place for discretion. What do you think?
Exploring Enron’s Emails
After 200 of Enron's internal emails were placed in the public domain by the Federal Energy Regulatory 
Commissioned (FERC) back in 2003, innovative software company Trampoline Systems created the Enron Explorer based on their own SONAR platform. In the Enron case, SONAR was able to illustrate existing social networks and information by analyzing email content from the entire organization during the 1999-2003 time period. Though the 200 emails that became part of the investigation are not representative of every part of the company, the sample does give insight into internal communications at the highest levels at Enron before, during and after its collapse.
What is Daylife?
Paid Content has a tiny bit of scoop on Daylife , a news startup that will "soft launch" this coming Monday. What Daylife is exactly is clear as mud. Here's the generic description Paid Content offers up:
"The mission is to gather and organize news in ways that are most relevant to the user. That could be by event, topic, author, geography or other factors. Source pages that show what a journalist writes about or who is quoted are part of the mix."
If forced, I'd guess it is a more journalism-centric version of social news sites like Digg, Techmeme and Newsvine. And no, I don't know what that means really. Regardless, get ready for the hype. The list of investors and advisors is filled with big names in the tech and journalism communities. They include Jeff Jarvis (Buzz Machine), Craig Newmark (Craig's List), Mike Arrington (Techcrunch), Dave Winer (Scripting News) and a little organization called the New York Times Company. I'm looking forward to giving it a test drive.
Republicans Outnumber Democrats Online
A recent study from Nielson//Netratings found that there are more Republicans than Democrats online. Of U.S. adults surveyed, 36.6 percent identified themselves as Republicans, 30.8 percent as Democrats and 17.3 percent as Independents.
This makes perfect sense given that other studies have shown that Republicans tend to earn more money than Democrats. The more money you make the more likely you are to have Internet access.
Here are some other tidbits from the study:
- The websites that attracted the highest percentage of Republicans were RushLimbaugh.com (84.8%), NewsMax.com (65.4%), BillOReilly.com (65.4%) and the Drudge Report (59%).
- The websites that attracted the most Democrats were BlackAmericaWeb.com (79.8%), AOL Black Voices (64.8%), BET.com (58.6%) and Salon (55.3%).
- The Wall Street Journal was the most Republican newspaper in terms of demographic breakdown (40.2% Republican and 25.8% Democrat) while the New York Times skewed the most toward Democrats (52.3% Democrat and 18.3% Republican).
Based on the sites named, it’s clear the survey only looked at mainstream media sites and didn’t dive into the blogosphere. Be interesting to see the breakdown for the most popular political blogs.