From
The Center for Media Research….

BuzzMetrics, a company specializing in word of mouth research and planning, released a new report revealing how word of mouth and online discussion forums shaped a food-industry crises. When a leading consumer advocacy group filed a lawsuit against food giant Kraft over its use of partially-hydrogenated oils in Oreo cookies, a frenzy erupted across thousands of consumer online discussion platforms.

According to BuzzMetrics’ analysis of over 2.6 million comments from over 120,000 consumers, the Ban Trans Fats legal assault on Oreo caused the total volume of online discussions on trans fats to increase more than eightfold in the same month.

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Assume a particular business plays by “the rules.” It operates legally and doesn’t engage in business practices that would make it uncomfortable if exposed. But it is a ruthless competitor.

Is ruthlessness itself immoral?

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The name says it all…which is good because I’m at a conference and haven’t actually browsed through the site. (Thanks to Judy Clark for the link.)

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Ah, the sweet smell of fresh looseleaf binders and the snap of glazed plastic covers being fitted to dog-eared textbooks that have bludgeoned the curiosity of generations of school kids tell us that Conference Season is upon us. It begins today with a private meeting to get back into the swing of things and is followed immeidately by Friends of O’Reilly, the getaway weekend for unwashed geeks. (Hey, the temporary showers are cooooold!)

Better check my Conference Kit: Power strip? Check. Careful selection of t-shirts with expressions that capture my inner essence, to be worn under my shirt so no one can see them? Check. Extra bag of typos to make conference blogging look authentic? Got ’em. 500 business cards to be crinkled in my bag long before I ever remember to give one out?Yup. Impressive book to leave in my lap as I watch “Everyone Loves Raymond” reruns on the plane? Check. Oh, and I have to remember to leave at least one power brick behind so I can scramble to find a replacement. Which one should it be this time? Cell phone? Palm? Camera? Or should I go straight for the big one, the laptop? So many decisions…

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Zephyr Teachout, one of my very favorite faves from the Dean campaign, is heading up the oddly-named Baobabs College Labs Project, funded by Mitch Kapor and Freada Kapor Klein, intended to get out the college vote. From the press release:

The campaign is targeting a dozen universities in swing states such as Ohio, New Mexico, Arizona, and Pennsylvania. Selected progressive student organizers on these campuses are given stipends, support, and online community building tools developed on the Howard Dean campaign.

…The effort hopes to spread online beyond the initial schools using such web tools as Civic Space, formerly “Dean Space,” Advokit, open source GOTV software, and Forwardtrack, open source petition software.

The project hopes to use blogs as a way to organize and inspire. The name comes from an African tree that looks like its been turned “roots side up.”

Go Zephyr! Go college organizers! Get out the vote! Get out the right vote!

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Dan has written a thoughtful essay that tries to help us learn from accidents and extreme, intentional accidents (= terrorism). He looks at Charles Perrow’s Normal Accidents and the 9/11 Commission Report (which he has excerpted helpfully here). Dan draws too many insights to summarize, but the need for providing flexible, two-way communication systems so that non-officials can act effectively leaps out at me.

(By coincidence, Dewayne Hendricks today talked about how a couple of strategically positioned repeaters were able to provide a forest fire command center with wifi communications access.)

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Today at the Berkman Center, Dewayne Hendricks of the Dandin Group led a 1.5 hr presentation/discussion of California’s Gigabit or Bust Initiative and the general state of massive wifi connectedness. Dewayne has been setting up large (really large) wireless networks in Tonga and Mongolia where the regulatory environment is – let’s say – looser than here in the US. Thus, he can put technologies to the test that are caught in political bear traps in this country. Fascinating.

The gigabit initiative intends to deliver 1 gigabit access to all Californians by 2010. Dewayne is convinced that only wireless will do it because the wire-based infrastructure is dominated by incumbents who don’t much like the idea that citizens will use, say, VoIP via wifi instead of their services. But Dewayne thinks it’s going to happen and it’s going to happen fast: citizens and municipalities will create wireless networks bringing high-speed connectivity at low costs. He seems especially excited about the bottom-up networks. Yeah, who isn’t, but this is a guy who’s providing services aross island archipelagos and thus has a bit more experience than people like me who hang a wifi box outside their 2nd floor window and feel like they’re now a People’s ISP.

Afterwards, there was a spirited discussion of how the clouds over municipalities will connect. Within the cloud, people are sharing data peer to peer at tremendous speeds. But to go from my cloud to your cloud, we either need an intermediary cloud (which may take a while to develop) or some sort of backbone. How’s it going to work? Dewayne thinks that there is technology on the way that will span enough distance to let clouds talk to clouds. (Cue Joni Mitchell.)

A couple of interesting Nuggets o’ Fact: Apparently 66% of global Net traffic is p2p, and 60% of that is video. in the US, 80% of traffic is video. Globally, only 11% of traffic is the Web.

Some urls I jotted down from Dewayne’s talk:

HPwren

sflan

SocialFreeNet

Note: All mistakes in the above characterization of Dewayne’s ideas are due to the denseness of the filter between him and you.

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Interesting discussion at slashdot about a blog system written on top of Google Gmail. Is it permitted? Is it frivolous? Is it in Google’s interest? These are all fair questions, but the main point I think is: Open up a capability and people will do the unexpected with it.

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It’s about freaking time Kerry said this!

Resolved: Howard Dean didn’t have enough influence on the Democratic candidate’s campaign.

Oh,, and, yes, Kerry’s statement is consistent with his vote to authorize the war.

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I may have grown not just to hate but actually to fear the Quicken user interface – which used to be its strongest feature – but I will say that when they chnaged the internals of their bill pay system, they treated their customers right: They sent us a free copy of Quicken Premier 2005.

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