There was something refreshing in the political scene Wednesday when congressional sponsors ran away, as fast as they could, from two ill-considered bills that sought to stamp out Internet piracy by more or less stamping out the Internet.

Maybe it was the bipartisanship of the online smackdown’s target. Most Americans are fed up with the never-ending electioneering between Republicans and Democrats, who seem to launch the next campaign as soon as the polls close. Last year, the two parties and the two houses of Congress could not seem to get together on anything. But legislators of both persuasions were elbow-deep in the muck of somehow trying to apply U.S. copyright laws to web sites located everywhere except inside the United States. It was fun to watch them scurry together in search of cover.

Or maybe it was the public humiliation inflicted on the nation’s two most ham-handed defenders of intellectual property, the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America. Most of us know the RIAA for its past practice of suing teenagers, their moms and grandmothers, and dorm-dwelling college students for illegally sharing and downloading music files. Earlier, the good folks at the MPAA were behind the film industry’s attempt nearly three decades ago to squelch video cassette recorders because they feared owners would retain copies of movies that were broadcast on television. Fortunately for the film industry, it lost the Betamax case, and a profitable market for pre-recorded videos developed as a result. These days the studios seem almost deft by comparison, with their public service announcements featuring union-scale crew members who urge viewers not to download videos illegally.

Music and movie companies are not wrong to want to protect their products from theft. They just have a remarkable talent for making themselves look nasty in the process.

I think the most satisfying aspect of this week’s developments is the way the online community rose up to fight back. The most visible blow came from Wikipedia, which blacked out its English-language site for 24 hours to protest the two bills. Some of Wikipedia’s contributing editors reportedly objected to the service, which strives for impartiality in its articles, injecting itself into a public policy debate. But as a financial contributor to Wikipedia, I had no complaints. Precisely because it is non-commercial and user-supported, Wikipedia has no vested interest in the tug of war over copyrighted content, and its point of view (and vast user base) added a powerful voice to the political debate.

Still, Wikipedia could not seem to help itself from being helpful, despite the blackout. It left its articles about the two bills, the Stop Internet Piracy Act and the Protect IP [Intellectual Property] Act, accessible during the outage. It even told users that they could circumvent the 24-hour blockade by disabling javascript on their browsers.

Elsewhere, Google covered the logo on its home page with a black patch. Visitors who clicked on the patch or on a separately labeled link were directed to an online petition opposing the legislation. Wired.com blacked out the headlines on its home page. Popular blogging site WordPress.com censored its “Freshly Pressed” highlights page. By at least one estimate, as many as 7,000 sites may have joined the protest. The protest attracted worldwide attention, as outlets like the United Kingdom’s Guardian newspaper rounded up some of the more interesting screen shots.

To its credit, the Obama administration got ahead of the curve when it announced last weekend that the president would not sign the legislation in its original form. The first drafts of the bills would have demanded that U.S.-based service providers corrupt the net’s domain name service, which is the system that translates a name such as Google.com into a sequence of numbers that point to a particular data server. This would be a technical nightmare and could open all sorts of new possibilities for the thieves, hackers and other genuine black hats who prowl the online world from the most lawless corners of the globe.

But even with last-minute changes, the legislation would have allowed the U.S. attorney general to create a blacklist of foreign sites that allegedly infringed U.S. intellectual property. There would have been limited court review and even more limited avenues for appeal. Search engines would have been required to withhold results from such sites; service providers would be required to prevent American web surfers from reaching them; and payment services such as Paypal would be barred from remitting funds to them. The easiest way for U.S. residents to see the entire Internet, once such legislation is passed, would be to check into a hotel in Canada.

Though the legislation did not explicitly target U.S. providers like Google, those organizations noted that it would impose major headaches, such as vetting every site that hosts a source document or, in some cases, it would force them to lie to users by stating that no relevant search results are available. Also, the American approach to censoring foreign sites would be an invitation for other democratic governments to impose their own restrictions. Britain would likely assert its Official Secrets Act and pre-trial crime reporting restrictions against Americans. France would want to impose its hate speech limits on documents that Google indexes and archives, and Germany’s anti-Nazi laws would get extraterritorial heft. Not to mention the field day that information-restrictive countries such as Singapore would have. The United States would go from being a global role model for free speech to the global standard-bearer for cross-border censorship.

Well before night fell on Washington, the legislation’s former backers were peeling away from it. Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, called the Senate bill “not ready for prime time,” The New York Times reported. Hatch had been one of its original sponsors.

It is tempting to say that the legislation is dead, killed by a grassroots rebellion of Internet users, but I would not bet on that. Online piracy is not the vast scourge that the old-line media companies pretend that it is when they count each free download as a lost full-price sale, but neither is the theft of American-generated content a trivial matter. Right here at Palisades Hudson, we have had some of our online content lifted and even altered without permission, and in some cases without attribution. Since we are fussy about what we say and where we say it, we take such violations seriously. Our reputation is worth a lot to us.

So the big content publishers will be back. You can sense it in the churlish tweet that RIAA executive Jonathan Lamy posted in the midst of Wednesday’s protest: “After Wikipedia blackrout (sic), somewhere, a student today is doing original research and getting his/her facts straight. Perish the thought.”

As I said, even when they have a valid point, these folks make themselves look nasty. You can’t get far in show business without having some sort of talent.

Larry Elkin is President and Founder of Palisades Hudson Financial Group LLC.

The young people who started the Occupy Wall Street protest a few weeks ago are about to learn some important lessons about life in the grown-up world.

Lesson One: If you don’t have an objective, someone else will be glad to give you one. In this case the “someone else” means both labor unions, which have been fighting a losing battle to mobilize popular support, and the Democratic Party, which is searching for ways to feed public antagonism toward the financial industry without reducing the value of anybody’s 401(k).

Lesson Two: Protesting against something is useful if you want to prevent change. If you don’t want Wal-Mart coming to your town, you protest against Wal-Mart. But if you actually want change, you have to be for something. Until the union activists moved in, Occupy Wall Street was not for any particular thing that I could determine. It was just against Wall Street, whatever that means.

Lesson Three: You don’t drive a car from the outside. You need to have your hands on the controls. This, incidentally, requires you to learn how to drive. People marched for civil rights, which was good and important, but the civil rights movement ultimately progressed because Congress changed laws, lawyers brought lawsuits and judges made judgments. If you want to make an individual impact, rather than just be part of the crowd, you have to acquire skills that put you in the driver’s seat. Most protest gatherings, like the anti-austerity protests ongoing in Greece, simply vent public frustration without ultimately changing anything. Change requires an achievable goal and the know-how to achieve it.

There is both naiveté and cynicism surrounding the Occupy Wall Street protest. It reminds me in many ways of the protests by young French citizens in 2005 and 2006 against “précarité,” or precariousness, in their lives. A photo of a Paris march from that time shows a banner that reads, “No to précarité, for a real increase in buying power, no to dismantling the labor code,” as though the state could somehow guarantee jobs for life and rising productivity. There were similar sentiments here at the time, and many complaints about rising income inequality and a stagnant minimum wage (which was raised in 2007). Now, a lot of people look back on 2005 or 2006 as the good old days.

I suspect a more direct inspiration for the current protest was the tent city that sprouted this summer on one of Tel Aviv’s most fashionable boulevards. It was started by young Israelis who were upset at the high cost of housing in Israel, though it morphed into a broader demand for “social justice,” apparently defined as some combination of higher wages and lower prices.

Even in the current post-bubble era for U.S. real estate, young people in New York City have much to complain about when it comes to housing prices. They seldom make the connection between the absurdly tight rental market, which makes New York one of the few places where renters customarily pay commissions to brokers, and the price controls on rents that have been in effect (in varying forms) since the city declared a housing emergency in 1947.

Many of these young people are saddled with debt left over from college, and they are struggling in a stagnant economy and stalled job market. It is probably safe to say that many were Obama supporters in 2008 and that most will still favor him next year – if they are motivated enough to vote at all. And I suspect a lot have a history of “progressive” sympathies, such as advocating for living wage laws back on their college campuses. I apologize for the generalizations, but there is, as yet, no “Occupy Wall Street” platform that I can quote.

But outsiders will be happy to provide one soon enough. Unions have taken a drubbing in elections and state legislatures all over the country, and they are happy to make common cause with the protesters. Unlike unemployed twentysomethings, however, the unions know exactly what they want: card-check organizing rules, collective bargaining rights for public servants (who bargain against the politicians they help elect), pension and health benefits that don’t exist in the private sector, and higher taxes – which most of the Occupy Wall Street protesters will someday pay – to cover the bill.
Some friends told me last weekend that their 23-year-old son was among the marchers in lower Manhattan. I don’t know the young man, but he is unemployed and looking for work as a computer programmer. Knowing his parents and his educational background, I am certain he is very smart, and probably going to earn a good living for himself someday.

Which makes me wonder: If some of those Wall Street firms being protested set up a table and held a job fair across the street from the protests, would they draw a crowd? It’s an interesting mental image.

Such events always pose the risk that fringe elements, such as the clowns who rioted in Seattle during a 1999 meeting of the World Trade Organization, will subvert the protest to their own agenda. Police overreaction, the granddaddy of which was at the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968, is also a risk, but one which – in a mild way – protesters would welcome for its publicity value, as in last week’s arrests on the Brooklyn Bridge.

The more likely outcome, though, is that these protests will simply be co-opted by the existing power structure of the political left. Democrats are eager to find someone to run against in 2012 as they struggle with their party’s own record on the economy. The bogeymen of choice have thus far been the Tea Party, the elusive “millionaires and billionaires” and, intermittently, Wall Street. The party that produced the economy that left these young people frightened and unemployed will tap them to protest their own fear and unemployment.

That’s the cynical part.

I have a warm spot in my heart for young people. It’s hard to make your way in an adult world where you gradually, but inevitably, learn that a lot of people will cheerfully lie to you or manipulate you to their own purposes. You find out that there are at least two sides to every story, that there are very few pure heroes or villains, and that problems are easy to identify but maddeningly complicated to solve. And you find out that despite all your parents may have done to make your life secure, the world is, indeed, filled with précarité, and that no amount of protest can make it go away.

Larry Elkin is President and Founder of Palisades Hudson Financial Group LLC.

Photo Credit: CriticalLegalThinking.com

by Dave Zornow

On a day when the world mourns the loss of Steve Jobs and the tech industry is iWriting about the iMac-iPod-iPhone-iPad, it’s valuable to remember that the original Man-In-Black didn’t always have the Midas touch. Which makes his successes that much more remarkable.

We’ve had an an Mac in our house since April 1984 — somewhat influenced by that iconic 1984 Superbowl spot introducing the first Macintosh. So, it’s fair to say we are fans from waay back.

The 1990's vintage Mac Classic, which holds a prominent place in our basement next to the water meter.

On the day after Steve’s death, we remember the good times. But, to be honest, they weren’t always good times.

For years — maybe decades — we suffered the taunts of the IT Crowd who called the Mac “a toy.” In 1990, I remember a conversation I had with the head of the computer department at my employer about bringing in a Macintosh to help create the cutting edge presentations our clients expected — work that was not possible to do on our Wang Word processors. In no uncertain terms, I was told no. Actually, her specific words were, “Thou shalt not use the ‘M’ word here.” My employer at the time was MTV Networks.

Like I said, it wasn’t always easy being a Mac fan.

Steve made us suffer in the early years because he refused to conform to the wishes of the IT community. Or even go out of his way to sell to the US government.

Winner of the “didn’t you see that coming award,” his hand picked successor at Apple Computer, John Scully, led a successful coup which ousted Jobs from the company he co-founded. Steve Jobs is also the guy who brought us the Apple III, didn’t think there was a future in desktop publishing, championed the pre-Macintosh LISA flop and could never get his head around the idea that two buttons on a mouse might be useful.

Then there’s that whole flash thing.

This is the guy who was the first to take away our built-in dial-up modems, forced us to use 3 1/2 drives when the rest of the world was 5 1/4 and floppy and finally took away our disk drives completely. Oh, and after he left us with only a network port, he then introduced a tablet computer that had no network port at all.

It hasn’t been an easy ride. Although his computers are fashionable, it’s hard to idolize a megalomaniac whose idea of a fashion statement is wearing a black turtleneck. All of the time. For 25 years.

One of the funny things about that Superbowl commercial is that most Apple users who were born after the Macintosh spot probably wouldn’t guess that the Big Brother in that spot was IBM. The first 128K Macintosh was the David to the IBM-PC Goliath. No, kids, it wasn’t Microsoft. It’s another testament to how far Apple has come since 1984 — these days IBM doesn’t even make PCs anymore, having sold that business to Lenovo.

At last Spring’s commencement address, Ithaca College President Thomas R. Rochon noted that when the graduates were freshman the first iPhone was introduced. As they received their diplomas, consumers were waiting on the fifth version of this revolutionary product. One which paved the way for the equally successful Android phone, too. As consumers, we have received quite a tech education during the time these kids were getting their college educations. And none of this would have happened if it were not for Steve.

For years, people have been talking about slate computing. And now we have the wildly successful iPad and iPad2. Forget about the fact that its no more than an iPhone with a bigger screen. It took a lot of vision and guts to “make it so.”

Despite his failures (I can’t even remember what that Apple see-through cube computer fiasco was called), Steve Jobs transformed Apple, the IT business, the way we look at user interfaces, how we use phones, the way we buy and listen to music, and how “tech” products are marketed to consumers. But for Steve, it was never about the tech — it was always about the consumer. Which is a legacy which will live on far beyond the Cult of Steve.

Steve Jobs, for all of his faults and failures, created a phenomenon, got kicked to the curb, and then resurrected both his company and his career from the dead all while making the turleneck stylish again. Steve Jobs, RIP.

It will come as no surprise to regular readers of Mediapost that Joe Mandese is no fan of Nielsen. Mandese, the Editor-in-Chief at MediaPost, has frequently skewered the ratings company for things they have done and much of the time, Nielsen critics applaud his efforts. But researchers say Mandese crossed a line with last week’s story, “Nielsen Discloses Major TV Ratings Glitch, Could Impact Millions In TV Ad Buys” because there was no major glitch — with the possible exception of how MediaPost reported the story.

Researchers were scratching their collective heads about this story which implied that Nielsen’s new online campaign ratings initiative was connected to a relatively obscure Average Frequency calculation error in Reach And Frequency custom analyses when used with ten month old data. “A week after unveiling an aggressive plan to convince the ad industry to use its new Facebook panel as the ‘GRP’ for online advertising and media buys, Nielsen Wednesday began informing clients about a major snafu with the one that generates GRPs for the multi-billion television advertising marketplace,” Mandese wrote in MediaPost on Thursday, September 22.

But users of Nielsen data weren’t buying the connection. “Most advertisers get their post-campaign analyzes from MSA, which is a straight C3 data stream based on impressions,” said multi-platform media research consultant Rande Price.”This has nothing to do with Facebook/OCR,” added another Nielsen client.

Each of the dozen Ad Supported cable researchers polled for this story faulted MediaPost’s reporting on the issue. Most noted that this was not the first time MediaPost had played fast-and-loose with the facts while on a Nielsen-bashing crusade. “Why does Joe hate Nielsen so much?,” asked a 25 year veteran user of these data. “Joe has admitted that he’s a journalist, not a researcher…and is more concerned about the headline than the facts in the story,” commented another researcher.

“Having spent the better part of the morning running this down, it is clear that today’s coverage has blown this well out of proportion, starting with a sensational headline…that is truly irresponsible,” wrote Larry Goldstein, Chief Media & Research Officer at Media Management, Inc. in a comment on MediaPost’s website.

“MediaPost has been taking lessons from the cable news networks and Nielsen is their whipping boy,” said one basic cable researcher. “Sometimes the criticism is deserved, but this incident was minor and the MediaPost story blew it out of proportion.” Research executives worry that the fallout from bad reporting wastes time and focus, with the internal scrambling around to answer questions from panicked network executives wasting resources that should be used to address more serious issues with the ratings monopoly.  “E-mails start flying around.   Everyone wants an explanation and potential impact in the marketplace,” says a broadcast and cable researcher. “Then programming chimes in that all Nielsen data is bad – how can you trust anything they say?” Researchers say ratings-related misinformation undermines everyone’s credibility — including MediaPost’s. Expressing the sentiment heard from many of these researchers, one basic cable source said, “Nielsen is far from perfect, but the state of measurement is better now than ever before.”

The Thursday story was picked up by TVWeek’s TVBizWire and was reprinted verbatim, attributed to MediaPost.

On Friday, MediaPost printed a retraction — sort of. In a follow-up article headlined “Nielsen Plummets, Rentrak Soars On News Of Ratings Glitch, Cuban Investment,” Mandese noted that “Nielsen’s stock price plummeted” and speculated that the previous day’s story may have contributed to Nielsen’s Wall Street woes. “News that Nielsen had disclosed a major TV ratings glitch contributed to a sell-off driving its share value down 9%,” Mandese wrote in an an article which also reported that billionaire Mark Cuban had increased his stake in Nielsen’s local measurement rival, Rentrak. After quoting Deutsche Bank analyst Matt Chesler (“the glitch disclosed by Nielsen would actually have ‘minimal impact’”) Mandese admitted that the previous day’s story was in error. In the seventh paragraph of the article, Mandese wrote that the September 22 story “…incorrectly implied that that the glitch may have impacted Nielsen’s C3 ratings, which are the currency of national TV advertising buys, and the basis of most audience guarantees between networks and advertisers.”

MediaPost put the blame on Nielsen saying that no spokesperson was available on Wednesday or Thursday to comment on the snafu. But it begs the question: what was the rush? As a journalist, is it more important to be right — or to be first?

“Mediapost and other well-meaning industry journalists often misinterpret research data and put out misleading headlines,” says research consultant and agency veteran Steve Sternberg. “Nielsen’s notice on the subject was not as clear as it could have been, and someone not intimately involved in accessing Nieslen’s data could easily have come to the same conclusion.” Because it had no impact on the daily ratings currency which agencies extract from Nielsen “MIT” data, it would not have impacted the “millions in ad buys” which the headline claimed. “It had no impact on audience guarantees,” says Sternberg. “But it is still a major glitch that impacts research analysis often used in making buying decisions,” he said.

One of Mandese’s peers at a rival publication agreed with researchers’ criticisms. “I don’t think Joe really understands some of the research issues,” says one career media journalist. “He never picks up the phone to confirm details.” They added that the MediaPost style has been ‘ready, fire aim’ with an emphasis on attention-getting headlines with less effort invested in fact checking. But this journalist also faulted Nielsen for how they handled the issue, too. “They get into trouble like this all of the time, not anticipating what will happen when a client notice isn’t perfectly clear in its meaning.”

The day following the MediaPost story, Nielsen issued a statement in response on 9/22 to the MediaPost article earlier that day. “Nielsen has informed clients that as a result of changes made earlier in the year for the measurement of multiple viewing of programs in TV homes,  the reporting of Program Viewing Frequency in the NPOWER tool is overstated, affecting the NPOWER-reported Program GRP,” said Matt Anchin, Nielsen’s SVP for Global Communications. “There is no impact to C3 Commercial Data, Ratings and Projections, electronic data files used by other processors or to Reach or any other NPOWER-reported data.”

One of the quirky things about journalists — in all media — is the urge to beat the competition. It’s an odd holdover from the days when newsboys would scream “Extra Extra! Read All About It!” on the streets to generate sales and readership. Even in the 24/7-news-cycle-Internet age, this feeling persists, even though it’s very doubtful that many readers choose publications solely because they “broke” a story first. The average reader would much rather read a story that is right than first. In the rush to break a story, journalists give too little attention to the collateral damage that might be caused by getting things wrong; or in news terms, what it takes to fix what has been “broke.” Perhaps MediaPost — and many other news outlets — should heed the advice of Paul Simon: “Slow down, you move to fast. You’ve got to make this [story] last.”

One of my favorite series this summer is Current TV’s “50 Documentaries to See Before You Die.” Hosted by Morgan Spurlock (Director/writer/star of “Supersize Me”), the series counts down the top documentaries of the last 25 years. Documentarians like Michael Moore and Penelope Spheeris, as well as an expert panel of film industry pros and critics, discuss the impact of the films and tell the stories of how they were made. At this writing they haven’t revealed the top ten yet. I suggest you all watch the series and the final ten next week. There’s a lot we can learn to apply to our own content.

First of all: Passion. All of the documentarians exuded passion for their subjects. No matter whether the subject was Heavy Metal, the rise of extreme skateboarding, or the truth about the Vietnam War, every filmaker believed passionately that their story was one that had to be told.

Second: Go where the story takes you. Errol Morris never thought he’d get a 20 hour interview with Robert MacNamara, which became the center of “The Fog of War.” Andrew Jarecki started to make a film about children’s entertainers in New York and ended up making “Capturing the Friedmans.” Go where the story takes you, and don’t be afraid to tell the truth.

Third: Make it happen. Every project had its own troubles, ranging from a lack of funds, lack of historical footage, inexperience of the filmakers. They didn’t let the roadblocks stop them. The documentarians figured out a way to incorporate the roadblocks in the story or they worked around them. The passion they had for their subjects wouldn’t allow them to give up.

So find a story that fires your passion. Go where that story takes you. Make it happen. In the words of M.B. Ray:

“Begin doing what you want to do now. We are not living in eternity. We have only this moment, sparkling like a star in our hand — and melting like a snow flake.”

Peter M. Gordon is a writer, public speaker, and media consultant in Orlando, FL. This article was originally posted at MyProgramIdea.blogspot.com.

The word schadenfreude, defined as deriving pleasure from the misfortunes of others,” may be unfamiliar to you unless you speak German or have seen the Broadway Musical Avenue Q. But if you are a fan of shock-jock morning radio, you are probably familiar with the concept.

The syndicated “Elvis Duran and the Morning Show” beamed from New York’s Z-100 features a regular segment called Phone Taps where a friend or relative of a listener pranks the unsuspecting ex-friend and current relative-in-exile. In a segment broadcast today on Miami’s Y-100 WHYI, a man called his fiancee at work to tell her that her new car, left running with the keys in it, had been stolen while he stopped off to grab a power shake. She freaked. Her panic was exacerbated when the morning show host, masquerading as the thief, dialed in from her boyfriend’s stolen Blackberry and asked how much she was willing to pay to get her car back.

She wasn’t happy. “Why would you do this to me?” she asked the boyfriend after the prank was revealed.

Throughout the five minute segment I kept thinking, “ok, what’s funny about this?” until I realized it wasn’t supposed to be funny. It was supposed to be schadenfreude.

Elvis Duran’s winning formula in morning drive has won him fans and ratings in 27 markets. The Phone Tap segment even spawned a short-lived four-episode reality show called Phowned on Spike TV last December.  WHTZ-FM (aka Z-100) consistently ranks in the top New York radio stations on the strength on the Elvis Duran show.

Having spent the beginning of my career working in radio, I have some appreciation for the accomplishments of Mr. Duran. Top of the ratings heap in New York with clearances in major markets is no mean feat. I also realize the golden age of radio has long since passed — it was long ago dead and buried by the time I spent five years in the business 35 years ago. (Eight months was spent as Producton Manager of America’s first disco radio station. Yes, that was a long time ago) But after hearing the stolen car/not really stolen phony phone call, I have to ask: “That’s Entertainment?”

It’s pretty clear that this Phone Tap did irreparable harm to this relationship. I’m no marriage counselor, but when your fiancee screams into the phone “why would you do this to me?” across 27 markets during morning drive, it’s likely that there are some rough times ahead for you and the missus. (although you could argue that this Phone Tap was The WTF Intervention this relationship really needed, and without it these guys were going to implode sooner or later).

What I’m not sure of is why people enjoy this. Are there really enough Germans listening to radio in morning drive to make Elvis a winner?

Don’t blame the Germans. They might get credit for creating the word. But it takes American ingenuity to turn other people’s pain into morning drive gain.

New York, June 13 — New York Times David Brooks is an accomplished journalist and an author who has no sympathy for his publishing peers.

Brooks gave the keynote address at the Advertising Research Foundation Audience Measurement 6.0 conference (ARF AMS 6.0) on Monday, quoting frequently from his recent book “The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement.” He also spoke rapidly — giving anyone in the audience who was trying to take notes hand cramps and head shakes.

Fortunately, there were other social animals who came to the rescue. Here are some of the high points of his presentation, supported by twitterin’ soci-animals in the audience.

Brooks noted three key insights derived from current social science research.

• “While the conscious mind writes the autobiography of our species, the unconscious mind does most of the work,” said Brooks.  “People named Dennis are more likely to become dentists. And people named Lawrence are more likely to become lawyers.” Brooks says it’s because we unconsciously gravitate toward things that sound familiar. Although the human brain can take in millions of pieces of information a minute, we can only handle about 40 separate items. It’s our unconscious mind that decides what to leave i and what to leave out.
• “Emotions are at the center of our thinking,” said Brooks.  “They are the foundation of reason because they tell us what to value.” Brooks posited that emotions aren’t separate from reason but that they are central to organizing the way we think.
• Riffing on the “man is not an island theme,” Brooks says that humans are social animals. “We are not primarily self contained individuals,” he says. Humans are social — not rational — and the sum of what we are emerges out of the relationships we have with others.

Brooks also described a number of traits which set us apart which help define our inner social animal.

• Mindsight: The ability to look into other peoples eyes and download what they have to offer. “Babies come with the ability to mimic people around them,” said Brooks. “Mimicry is an important social skill.” Brooks cited work from the University of Minnesota where researchers were able to predict which children were likely to graduate from high school based on their ability to have a good two way conversation with their mother when they were 18 months of age.
• Equipoise: The ability to read the biases and failures in your own mind.
• Medes: “What we might call street smarts, shows a sensitivity to the physical environment, the ability to pick out patterns in an environment.” When someone says I get the gist of something, they are displaying medes. Soldiers in Iraq can look down a street and tell you there’s an IED somewhere. They don’t know how they know — they just do.
• Brooks said creativity comes from blending two different ideas together.  Picasso combining the concept of Western art and the concept African masks is one example.
• Limerence actually isn’t an ability, but a word that describes a person’s drive and a motivation. “The conscious mind hungers for success and prestige,” said Brooks. “The unconscious mind hungers for moments of transcendence and we are lost in a challenge or a task,”says Brooks.

And what did the masses “tw-ink” of Brooks comments in the Twitterverse? Here’s a sampling:

• #DavidBrooks: “We’re in the middle of a cognitive revolution”. — J.T. Compeau
• Via David Brooks @nytimes: Tough decision? Flip coin. Then act not on coin side up, but yr emotional reaction — Neil Glassman
• 19% of Americans think they are in the top 1% of earners. David Brooks at #ARFAM6. Annnd that’s why we always need scientific measurement! — David Coletti
• david brooks emotion is the foundation of reason and unconscious mind makes most decisions — The ARF
• David Brooks – emotion is the foundation of reason. Tells us what we value — fettersac
• Fascinating speech by #DavidBrooks. “Blending” of ideas is the “core of creativity,” leads to innovation. — J.T. Compeau
• Why tax breaks for the rich so popular. RT @ddcoletti: 19% of Americans think they are in the top 1% of earners.  — josh chasin
• RT @JTCompeau: “Emergent systems” are not “clocks”, “they need to be analyzed holistically” – DavidBrooks — Neil Glassman
• Via David Brooks @nytimes: Things on which we focus seem more important than are because we’re focusing on them — Neil Glassman
• David Brooks: Kids in homes where they develop strategies for impulse control do better in school. Doesn’t auger well 4 my kid. — josh chasin
• Yes! RT @fettersac David Brooks – emotion is the foundation of reason. Tells us what we value — Alan Edgett

See also:

• Sweetspeeches.com
• David Brooks at TED 2011, Huffington Post

When a hotel investment firm decided a 10-block stretch of Miami Beach needed a name, the easy part was coming up with SoBe 10, to catch a little of the cachet of South Beach. The hard part was getting the name to catch on.

The firm, Jones Lang LaSalle Hotels, decided the best way to get people to use its made-up name was to pretend people were already using it. Not long after he dreamed up SoBe 10, Gregory Rumpel, the firm’s executive vice president, inserted it into Wikipedia’s South Beach page. The modified entry read, “The ten blocks along Collins Avenue, from 15th Street to 24th Street, also known as the SoBe 10 or Power Mile, are considered to be the epicenter of South Beach nightlife and entertainment.”

Wikipedia’s openness makes it a tempting target for those looking to create their own versions of reality. But while most people know that Wikipedia is not 100 percent reliable, readers still expect entries to have some basis in fact.

Even when the “information” promoters add to Wikipedia is actual, rather than aspirational, it decreases the value of the site. Wikipedia articles are intended to be neutral and objective, like the content of traditional encyclopedias. Business owners and publicists who write or edit where their own interests are concerned are therefore acting deceitfully, implying a neutral perspective they do not actually have.

Wikipedia’s page on Wikipedia spam offers clear guidelines on how interested parties can avoid inadvertently interfering with the site’s mission. Would-be editors are instructed, “If you are here to tell readers how great something is, or to get exposure for an idea or product that nobody has heard of yet, you are in the wrong place.” The page also cautions users against creating pages for their own products and websites, explaining that “Most often, when a person creates a new article describing his or her own work, it is because the work is not yet well-known enough to have attracted anyone else’s attention.” Just as few employers go to candidates’ parents to get letters of recommendation, few Wikipedia readers want to hear that something is noteworthy from its creator.

Unfortunately, often publicists are more concerned with promoting products than they are with protecting the reliability of third-party websites. As we increasingly get our information from user-generated content – from Wikipedia rather than the Encyclopedia Britannica or from Yelp rather than newspaper restaurant reviews – we gain access to new voices and to more comprehensive data, but we lose important information about authors’ interests and motivations. A Wikipedia entry could be written by an expert, or by someone looking to introduce new “facts.” A good review on Yelp may come from a satisfied customer, but it may also come from the business’s owner or from someone who has never even visited the business.

A recent column in The New York Times revealed that a company called Softline Solutions, which provides reputation management among other online services, paid 25 cents for positive reviews posted on Yelp about its client, Southland Dental. Yelp filters reviews that appear to be fake, placing them on a separate page, but acknowledges that some legitimate content gets incorrectly filtered out and some less-than-legitimate content slips through.

Wikipedia’s vigilant editors and administrators, for the most part, ensure that profit motives are kept in line with the site’s mission, preserving reliability. By strictly enforcing community standards and deleting promotional content, Wikipedians send the message that any attempt to take advantage of the site is unlikely to succeed. In a 2010 press release, the public relations company Punch Communications advised other firms to avoid marketing on Wikipedia, not because it lowers the quality of the site, but because the risk of getting caught is too high. “While it may seem like a quick hit at first, once [a] post is deleted, the agency finds themselves having overpromised and under-delivered; something we all hate to do,” Pete Goold, a managing director at the company, said.

The same openness which allows promotional content to enter Wikipedia also helps to weed it out. Shortly after the mention of SoBe 10 appeared on Wikipedia’s South Beach page, an anonymous editor removed it, with the concise justification, “I’ve deleted the following, which is a made-up designation inserted for marketing purposes.”

As wikis become a bigger part of our lives, we owe ever greater thanks to those who keep them as clean and accurate as possible. In a letter on the site, Wikipedia’s founder, Jimmy Wales, writes, “Commerce is fine. Advertising is not evil. But it doesn’t belong here. Not in Wikipedia.” Keeping advertising out, however, requires hard work and dedication. And surviving without advertising requires the support of readers. Not everyone who reads Wikipedia can afford to donate to its mission, but it’s worth remembering the amount of work that goes into keeping the site free of promotional content, and also keeping it just plain free.

Larry Elkin is President and Founder of Palisades Hudson Financial Group LLC.

But this year’s graduation at Ithaca College in upstate New York wasn’t like that. The commencement remarks by college president Thomas R. Rochon used a classic movie scene from The Graduate about the life and times of a college graduate as a way to connect the students’ generation to their parents’.

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus is credited with the observation, “The only constant is change.” Rochon used Dustin Hoffman’s fictional character Benjamin Braddock as a metaphor to remind today’s graduates and their baby boomer parents just how true Heraclitus’ words ring today. “Change has become the only constant we can rely upon,” said Rochon.

If Benjamin had been a real person, he would have received his bachelor’s degree in 1967 – the year the film was released. He would now be 65 or 66 years old, about to retire. Think what he would have witnessed between the day he graduated and his retirement this year.

When Benjamin graduated, the greatest threat to American security was a country called the Soviet Union. The largest corporation in the world was General Motors, the same General Motors that recently emerged from bankruptcy. When Benjamin graduated, no one had ever been to the moon.

And, unlike many of you, we know that Benjamin actually listened to the speeches at his commencement because he had no other options unless he brought with him either a transistor radio or a battery-powered record player.

Today, the odds are pretty good that Benjamin is retiring from a job that did not exist in 1967, or that existed but is now performed in an entirely different way using technologies that were not even dreamed of when his career began.

Of course, 45 years is a long time. But consider the pace of change in just the last four years – the span of time most of you have been at Ithaca College.

When you were freshmen, there had never been an African-American president of the United States and there was no reason to think there would be one any time soon. When you started at IC, there had not yet been a global financial meltdown triggered by misplaced confidence in financial instruments that few people understood.

Rochon then ratcheted the change theme up a notch. Because things have changed since Heraclitus’ time. Change is no longer a constant. The rate of change is accelerating.

The first iPhone came out just before you began your freshman year. Today, as you graduate, you can buy a fourth generation iPhone at your local electronics store. And the blogs are full of rumors about new capabilities that will be added to the iPhone 5, surely coming soon.

It’s a great metaphor and a good analysis…except for the one little fib that Ithaca’s college president told the graduates. “You have not yet reached the generational divide at which one develops a desire to just have technology sit still for a few years so we can get comfortable with our existing gadgets before trading them in for new ones,” said Rochon. “You might never cross that generational divide. You may be the ones for whom change is so omnipresent that the only thing that would make you uncomfortable would be to find out that there will not soon be another major advance in the way we stay connected with each other.”

President Rochon, shame on you for lying to your students. Instead of this innocent fib, you  should have told them about what Joni Mitchell, a real contemporary of the fictional Benjamin Braddock, had to say about change in her 1970 song, The Circle Game.

“Tell him, ‘take your time.’ It won’t be long now — till you drag your feet to slow the circles down.”

Dave Zornow is a media research consultant, web applications developer and hyperlocal publisher in Nyack, NY.

Sources:

• Ithaca College President Thomas R. Rochon, Commencement Remarks, 5/22/2011
• WikiQuote on Heraclitus
• JoniMitchell.com, The Circle Game
• Wikipedia, The Graduate

Two questions for your consideration: “What are the networks looking for?” I also ask cable networks a similar question — “What shows do you want to air?”

It’s tough for most networks to answer that question except in the most general terms. Even if you have aimed your network at a particular audience segment — for example, Women 25-49, or men 35+ with average incomes of $75,000 per year — your audience is always changing and evolving. Women ages 25-49 do share similar interests in products, for example, but they don’t all buy the exact same products. Each member of that group is a person making their own individual choices. Every year, fashions change, tastes change, and a network needs to evolve with their audience or lost them.

While network executives can usually articulate what sorts of shows they will consider, they are also willing to push the envelope if that means they can add a hit show. For example, MTV started as Music Television. When was the last time you saw music videos on MTV in prime time? The network changed, because their audience’s taste changed

So the answer to the question, “what do networks want?” is simple. They want hits. But no one really knows for sure where the next hit show is coming from. So in my opinion you shouldn’t spend a lot of time tailoring your idea for a specific network in the beginning. Create as strong an ida as possible. Prove to the network that you have a potential hit for them. Then what will the networks want? They will want you.

Peter M. Gordon is a writer, public speaker, and media consultant in Orlando, FL. This article was originally posted at MyProgramIdea.blogspot.com.