Breakin the rules

This is just how backwards the media has become. It lists rules for the internet like these (thanks for the link Clint):

* Be careful who you 'friend'. Since this is a tricky subject, The Times suggests that its reports "imagine whether public disclosure of a 'friend' could somehow turn out to be an embarrassment that casts doubt on our impartiality."

* Don't specify your political views. This includes joining online groups that would make your political views known.

* Don't write anything you wouldn't write in The Times on your profiles, a blog or as commentary on content you share.

Do they not understand the boundary between your work and home life - much less being a real person. A reporter is not a movie star whose life should be under a microscope or a pastor who preaches piety and is the example to reach heaven.

This one is particularly irksome: "Don't write anything you wouldn't write in The Times on your profiles."

Think about how much that would be that you can't write anything you wouldn't want to be printed on your official work product? Come on. This is a new world. Stop treating reporters and your readers like children. Use more common sense. And let people be honest in the way they live.

I haven’t seen the mountain top

The Kingdom Day Parade came through my Leimert Park Neighborhood today so I seized the opportunity. I'm in the right place at the right time - history is being made and I'm in the middle of it.

I also found that if I can own things that come to my area it brings a lot of traffic – because if you search the term “leimert” and any word that I’ve featured (such as King Parade) my blog comes up near the top of google.

I grabbed my iphone and my Canon PowerShot SC800 IS Digital Elph camera and video recorder and walked the parade route twice. It’s been three years since I’ve been a reporter and probably that long since I worked that hard on an assignment. Five hours and about five miles.

With the iphone I took scene setting shots that I posted immediately to my community bulletin board/newspaper http://www.leimertparkbeat.com Those automatically post to my Facebook page where I’ve friended many reporters that might be interested in the topics on the blog. And I shot a picture of of a guy selling the day-after-Election day edition of the LA Times for $10 – I sent that to a media blog, LA Observed, that ran it immediately and linked to my site.

With the Canon, I shot the sounds and the sites of the parade – lots of marching bands, City Councilman Bernard Parks – and took higher quality still shots for later posts. I stopped work on the Website to post these blog posts for class. I think I’ll try to send that to LAist. Probably too late.

So the bottom line – this was a day I'll never forget. But a lot of work. But a ton of people will see it. And I just don’t know what’s supposed to come next. I guess that’s why I’m back in school.

Web 2.0 – The new Starbucks

Few times during my life have I seen something evolve from the beginning into a great thing.

Algebra, motion pictures, cars, airplanes, computers all were well established before I was going to high school. There were some businesses that caught on that I noticed - I worked at a Subway in 1988. And more times that not, they passed me by. I thought Starbucks reached it's apex in 2000 when "The Simpsons" showed store after store in the mall closing and being taken over by a Starbucks. But here we are and there are more coffee stores than you would ever believe.

That's how I see the Web. It was kind of born in the public consciousness as I graduated college. I watched it grow and grow. And now I see it is much more powerful than Subway and Starbucks - it's enveloping TV, Hollywood, bookstores and on and on.

So it seems we're lucky to be where we're at - even though I often feel like we came late to the game. I see that we are really at the very beginning - Hollywood in the 1930s, Detroit in 1920 - just 10 years after the 2.0 revolution.