The Church Alive Wins Best of Show!
As I mentioned earlier in the week, Pleth Networks, LLC was the proud recipient of 4 silver and 1 bronze Addy Awards at the 2009 NEA Adfed Banquet held in Jonesboro, Arkansas. In addition to the silver and bronze awards, we were also honored to have one of our entries, The Church Alive, chosen as this years coveted best of show for Interactive media. It has been a hectic week and I haven’t been able to blog about the award until now.
The Church Alive project has been a pet project of mine for the past year or so, and it is also where my wife and I attend church. My partners and I could not be more proud of this award, it’s our first Best of Show award from the American Advertising Federation. Below is a screenshot of our winning entry:
I would also like to say congratulations to all of the other winners at this years Addy Awards. If you are not familiar with the NEA Adfed or the American Advertising Federation, here’s a little information about the group:
AAF-Northeast Arkansas is made up of members who manage, buy, sell, create, produce, teach or study advertising, marketing, public relations or related fields.
AAF-NEA exists to bring together those interested in advertising/marketing for an active exchange of ideas. We strive to provide our members with professional development, recognition and networking opportunities. AAF-NEA is a local affiliate of the American Advertising Federation, a national organization that represents the Advertising industry.
Building a stronger advertising community through education and networking by promoting advertising as an essential element of the Northeast Arkansas economy and culture.
Also, here is a photo of the “best of show” trophy. I currently have it at my office in Conway, but I am going to have to eventually give it up to go on display at our office in Batesville unless we can get duplicates made of it. It sure looks great on my bookcase!!!
Facebook TOS Update
I posted a blog entry last week about the whole Facebook Terms of Use thing that everyone was up in arms about and subsequently was pulled by Facebook after a public outcry. Here’s that blog post if you are interested.
Well, apparently the upper level management at Facebook has enlisted a PR firm or something because I see a little bit of genius (not that they Facebook folks aren’t genius already) in this announcement that was posted inside of Facebook today:
Today we announced new opportunities for users to play a meaningful role in determining the policies governing our site. We released the first proposals subject to these procedures – The Facebook Principles, a set of values that will guide the development of the service, and Statement of Rights and Responsibilities that governs Facebook’s operations. Users will have the opportunity to review, comment and vote on these documents over the coming weeks and, if they are approved, other future policy changes. We’ve posted the documents in separate groups and invite you to offer comments and suggestions. For more information and links to the two groups, check out the Facebook Blog.
This opens up the doors for dialogue with their users, which is a brilliant idea in my opinion. It gives them a stake in the negotiations, folks don’t like to have things handed to them, that’s the bottom line. It also furthers Facebook as a company I believe. Granted, it’s their TOS, but it appears that it is going to be shaped by their users in some small fashion.
I applaud Facebook for taking this approach. Again, I don’t think that they came up with this on their own, I am betting some Washington PR firm is already on their payroll by now…
What Can Eclipse Owners Do??
Here’s my question, if you forked out a million bucks for an airplane and the company goes out of business a year or so later and the FAA decides to ground the aircraft because there is no company out there to support the type certificate, what recourse do you have as an owner?? This Eclipse thing is going to end up being a huge mess!
Eclipse Aviation officials have given up on attempting to resurrect the bankrupt firm by means of Chapter 11 reorganization and instead filed a motion to proceed directly to Chapter 7 liquidation of all assets. The actions follows Eclipse Aviation’s failure to obtain additional bridge financing to continue operations until Luxembourg-based ETIRC’s EclipseJet Aviation International could buy the assets and resume operations.ETIRC was unable to complete the asset buy out by the end of January due to lack of funds, prompting its three largest secured creditors, Kings Road Investments, HBK Services and Citadel Investment Group, to press the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware to liquidate its assets.
As a result, 800 or so Eclipse Aviation employees on temporary furlough were informed on Tuesday they were being permanently laid off, effective Feb. 19. There will be no paychecks issued on March 5 and no vacation pay accruals will be honored. Coverage of all benefits will end on Feb. 28, 2009, however COBRA medical/dental/vision benefits may be available until March 31.
Eclipse officials anticipate that the U.S. Bankruptcy Court will appoint a trustee to oversee the Chapter 7 liquidation proceedings within 30 days. The trustee then will sell or auction off all the assets and intellectual property, delivering the proceeds to the secured creditors. But, company insiders believe the sale will recover only a fraction of their estimated fair market value of $75 million to $125 million.
Company insiders also believe the FAA will move quickly to ground the entire Eclipse 500 fleet because no entity will exist to support the Type Certificate.
Eclipse Aviation Files For Liquidation | AVIATION WEEK
Awesome #refreshca Meetup Last Night!
We had our first Central Arkansas Refresh Group Meetup last night at Starbucks on Rodney Parham Road last night and close to 20 programmers, bloggers, and all around tech folks showed up. It was a lot of fun, we had a blast! After the wall to wall introductions were made it was apparent that the group was extremely diverse.
While we had a lot of developers in the house representing a wide variety of languages (java, php, .net, and coldfusion) we also had a good representation of bloggers and media folks in attendance as well that kind of gave the group some balance. It made for some awesome conversation.
Some of the things we discussed last night, and forgive me if I leave off a few because I got so wrapped up at times that I failed to take notes, were twitter, facebook, wordpress, frameworks, and of course widgets (insert group giggle here). We also talked about video, blogs, monetization, and high-speed internet.
The conversations went on for close to three hours or so, I think a few of us hung out in the parking lot for another 30 minutes or so afterwards and discussed video cameras. I would like to thank those of you that were able to attend, I think that this group is going to take off in a big way. If you were unable to attend, stay tuned to our Facebook Group Page for future meeting notifications, we decided to hold our meetings on the last Tuesday of each month at a location soon to be announced. Also, special thanks to David Kincade at The Arkansas Project for helping to promote the event, he and I went back and forth during the week in hopes that we would have at least 10 or so folks show up, and the group almost doubled that, so I think it’s safe to say it was a success.
I am already looking forward to the next meetup, if anyone has any suggestions for locations, etc., post it to the facebook group page. Also, be sure to post your Twitter accounts to the group page as well so we can stay connected. I think that there is also some talk about setting up a website and discussion area in the near future so stay tuned for all of that.
One other note in closing, Nick had a great idea of using the hashtag, #refreshca for announcements about our group, it doesn’t appear to be in use by anyone yet, http://hashtags.org/search?query=refreshca&submit=Search.
Thanks for coming, tell a friend.
Looking forward to hooking up again soon!!!
Children’s Miracle Network / IHOP
If you are into pancakes and want to help out a worthy cause, you should head to your local IHOP today and take advantage of their free pancakes fundraiser, National Pancake Day Celebration, where the proceeds go toward supporting the Children’s Miracle Network.
Not that I really need the extra calories or anything but I might go anyway to help out a worthy cause! It’s a great excuse to go eat some pancakes and feel a little less guilty about it!
IHOP, one of America’s favorite restaurants for breakfast, lunch and dinner, has announced plans to serve millions of free pancakes in celebration of National Pancake Day on February 24, 2009. The celebration is designed to bring together friends and family, as well as to raise $1 million for Children’s Miracle Network, a non-profit organization dedicated to helping children’s hospitals, and other worthy causes.
2009 will mark IHOP’s fourth year of celebrating the national event, and nearly 1,400 IHOP restaurants throughout the United States will once again invite guests to enjoy a free short stack of IHOP’s signature buttermilk pancakes from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. In return, IHOP guests are asked to donate what they would have paid for the free pancakes, or more, to their local children’s hospital or another worthy cause. Additionally, Miracle Balloons will be sold for $1 each, personalized and displayed at participating IHOP restaurants from February 1 through February 24, 2009, offering guests another way to show their support of Children’s Miracle Network and contribute to the National Pancake Day fundraising effort.
Known also as Fat Tuesday or Mardi Gras, National Pancake Day dates back several centuries to when the English prepped for fasting during Lent. Strict rules prohibited the eating of all dairy products during Lent, so pancakes were made to use up the supply of eggs, milk, butter and other dairy products… hence the name Pancake Tuesday, or Shrove Tuesday.
Since the inception of National Pancake Day in 2006, IHOP has raised nearly $2 million to support charities in communities in which it operates. In 2008, IHOP gave away more than 1.5 million pancakes and raised over $875,000 in support of Children’s Miracle Network and other local charities, far exceeding its goal to raise $750,000.
For more information about IHOP’s National Pancake Day, or to learn more about Children’s Miracle Network and make an online donation, visit www.ihoppancakeday.com.
Children’s Miracle Network – IHOP
Faultline’s Addy Promo Video
Scott Reed and the good people at Faultline Studios put together the promo videos for this years Addy Awards and I have to commend them, they did an awesome job! This is just one of the promo videos that they put together leading up to the event. This cupid dude was one of the presenters at this years award banquet where we ended up with best of show for the interactive category and a few other awards (more on that later), just ran across this video and wanted to bring attention to their awesome work!
Gmail Service Hiccup
In case you didn’t hear, Google’s Gmail service had a major hiccup last night and early this morning according to several websites. I personally don’t rely on Google to get to my email but know a lot of people that do these days. I am old school I guess in that I still rely heavily on Microsoft Outlook to pull in my corporate email, calendar appointments, and tasks.
While I am not a heavy Gmail user, I do have my corporate account setup inside of my Gmail account to pull in my business emails in the event that I am traveling, etc. Expect everyone to give Google a hard time today, Here’s an article about the outage on ITPRO this morning:
Google’s popular Gmail service, went down this morning, preventing millions of users from accessing their email, justifying the service’s beta tag that remains several years after it was first introduced.
The outage occurred at approximately 9:30am GMT and appears to be worldwide. Some users have reported that Google Docs has gone down too, although this does not appear to be the case for everyone.
“A number of users are having difficulties accessing Gmail. We’re working to resolve the problem”. Google told IT PRO in a statement.
“We know how important Gmail is to our users so we take issues like this very seriously, and we apologies for the inconvenience. We encourage anyone having technical difficulties to visit the Gmail help centre at mail.google.com/support, where we are posting status updates on the situation.”
IT PRO contacted Google to clarify the situation and was provided with the statement over the phone. “I’ll have to read it to you if that’s OK -I can’t email you, obviously,” a spokeswoman said.
Not surprisingly, many Gmail users were alerted to the issue via Twitter, and the range of comments made it clear that the issue was worldwide.
However, not everyone was upset at the outage. “Enjoying the fact Gmail is down so I can get some work done and not be held hostage to my inbox,” commented one user. Meanwhile a Google Premier Apps user pondered how long the service would have to be down to break Google’s SLA. This was an issue raised in our recent review of the Google Premier Apps service.
At the time of writing. the Gmail service had been resumed, but only for some users.
Last month human error at Google caused every single website that appeared on its search engine to be flagged as malware.
Gmail service takes a break | IT PRO
Central Arkansas Refresh Meetup
In case you missed David Kincade’s post on The Arkansas Project this morning, we are going to have our first Central Arkansas Refresh Group Meetup this next Tuesday, February 24, 2009 at Starbucks (9401 Rodney Parham Road, Little Rock, AR) this next week.
We plan on hooking up around 6:00 or so and kind of setting the stage for this unique group. If you are interested in the meetup, here’s a link to our Facebook Event Page:
A couple weeks back I posted about this little group of Central Arkansas technology enthusiast types that Cotton Rohrscheib, area web guru/tech wizard/blogger/NASCAR fan, is looking to launch for networking and education purposes. Remember that?
Well, good news: We’ve set the inaugural meet-up for Tuesday, Feb. 24 at 6 p.m. in Little Rock, at the Starbucks on 9401 N. Rodney Parham Road. (A location somewhat arbitrarily arrived at because several of the interested parties may be coming from Conway and it has reasonably ready access to I-430. We may find another venue for future gatherings, once we have a better sense of who’s attending.)
This inaugural meeting will help us to develop a fuller organizational sense of who’s actually interested, what kind of topics we want to explore, how frequently we want to meet — mostly a ‘get to know you and swap ideas’ session to determine how we can make this a constructive venture for all involved.
You don’t necessarily have to be a hands-on tech wizard programmer type to join up — maybe you’re a blogger or an avid social media user or a chronic Internet porn consumer or just an all-purpose nerd with an abiding interest in the Web and technology issues. That’s fine; the more the merrier. Though probably the fewer the chronic Internet porn consumers, the better. I mean, a couple would be OK, but let’s not go overboard.
Go to our Facebook group page to get involved (or if you’re a hold-out who refuses to get on Facebook, just show up Tuesday).
New Pleth Logo
We are unveiling our new logo today just in time for the Northeast Arkansas Advertising Federation Banquet this weekend. The logo was designed by our good friend Melissa Powell at Powell Creative.
Thanks Melissa, we know how hard we are to work with on client projects so working with us on our own branding had to closely resemble a root canal. At any rate, thanks for your hard work, we love the new logo. I would love to hear input from some of my readers on the new logo too…
The Facebook TOS
I got no fewer than a dozen emails and twitters yesterday asking me what I thought about the new Facebook Terms of Service that was updated a few days ago so I thought I should probably weigh in on it and give everyone my take.
This morning, Facebook users were greeted with this message:
Over the past few days, we have received a lot of feedback about the new terms we posted two weeks ago. Because of this response, we have decided to return to our previous Terms of Use while we resolve the issues that people have raised. For more information, visit the Facebook Blog.
If you want to share your thoughts on what should be in the new terms, check out our group Facebook Bill of Rights and Responsibilities.
The bottom line, this change wasn’t something that Facebook came up with to potentially damage their users. This change to their TOS, in all probability came from their legal department and believe it or not it’s pretty standard operating procedure these days, especially with social networks. How can you avoid damaging your online reputation, or having something that you posted 10 years ago from coming back to haunt you later? It’s easy, don’t do anything dumb that you might regret later…
In todays day and age, everything you do online is cached in by a wide variety of methods. Without getting all technical, just go to the Wayback Machine, www.archive.org and type in a website. This website has archived versions of websites going “way back”, so yes even though you deleted that party photo from spring break on your blog, it might still exist out there. This is just one service that is out there, I am sure that there are others.
For these social networking sites, their frequent usage leaves them wide open for liability issues and frivolous lawsuits. Now, with that being said, could they have worded their TOS better? Yes. But, don’t expect the revised TOS to be anymore popular, I suspect it will be pretty much along the same lines, you should go under the assumption that anything you upload to Facebook could live forever and shared in various other places around the web through services like friendfeed, etc. Again, this goes back to “be smart” and don’t upload photos of yourself doing kegstands at Fort Lauderdale, and don’t let your friends do it either, ask Michael Phelps about this, I am sure he has some input as well…
Here is an article that ran on Fox about the change to the Facebook TOS that I thought was well written:
Just Trust Us…
That’s what Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg told the estimated 175 million users of his social-networking Web site Monday afternoon after the company had stepped into yet another bad-publicity mess of its own creation.
Basically, Zuckerberg told Facebook devotees that he’d never, ever do anything bad with their posted content — even though the user agreement says he’s perfectly entitled to do so.
"The trust you place in us as a safe place to share information is the most important part of what makes Facebook work," he wrote in a reassuring-sounding message on the official Facebook blog. "Our goal is to build great products and to communicate clearly to help people share more information in this trusted environment."
Still, that doesn’t change the fact that Facebook’s Terms of Service — the long legal document all users must agree to before they can sign up — grants the company "an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or … (ii) enable a user to Post."
Hundreds of thousands of Facebook users read that scary passage for the first time after the consumer-interest blog Consumerist.com lit up a sleepy holiday weekend on Sunday evening with a posting entitled "Facebook’s New Terms Of Service: ‘We Can Do Anything We Want With Your Content. Forever.’"
• Click here for the new Facebook Terms of Service.
• Click here for the old Facebook Terms of Service.
• Click here for FOXNews.com’s Personal Technology Center.
Consumerist’s posting was prompted by Facebook’s quiet tweaking of its Terms of Service on Feb. 4, which extended that license, which it had long assumed, into perpetuity even if a user terminated his or her Facebook account.
But the posting got more than 450,000 hits because people suddenly realized that they’d already handed over usage rights to every message, photo and music file they’d ever put on Facebook to Mark Zuckerberg.
"Now they can print and sell posters of the pictures you took, turn your posts into advertising jingles, whatever. Make a million bucks, and keep it all," wrote Consumerist commenter LandruBek. "Imagine a fun line of Facebook postcards, or a coffee table book, ‘The Faces of Facebook.’ They can do this, and Facebook members themselves won’t see a dime, because they gave away a license to do so."
Zuckerberg’s response was calm, even nurturing and caring.
"Our philosophy is that people own their information and control who they share it with," he wrote. "When a person shares information on Facebook, they first need to grant Facebook a license to use that information so that we can show it to the other people they’ve asked us to share it with. Without this license, we couldn’t help people share that information."
And he put forward a persuasive argument about why the license needed to be extended beyond the termination of a user account:
"When a person shares something like a message with a friend, two copies of that information are created — one in the person’s sent messages box and the other in their friend’s inbox. Even if the person deactivates their account, their friend still has a copy of that message. We think this is the right way for Facebook to work, and it is consistent with how other services like email work. One of the reasons we updated our terms was to make this more clear."
Some Internet commentators weren’t buying it.
"The e-mail example has a major hole in it," scoffed David Sarno in a blog posting on the Los Angeles Times Web site. "Facebook users generally do not ’send’ other types of content to one another, including photographs. Rather, they post them on their own profiles for others to stop by and see. There’s no obvious reason that Facebook would need to perpetually store multiple copies of photographs — because, as far as the user is concerned, they appear only in one place."
"It is difficult to trust a company that is stripping users of rights they’ve become accustomed to," wrote Erick Schonfeld on the TechCrunch blog. "If I upload a picture which I later regret uploading, why shouldn’t I be able to erase it from Facebook forever, even if some of my friends have already seen it?"
Facebook users naturally set up several groups protesting the changes to the Terms of Service — one called "People Against the new Terms of Service" had signed up 31,000 members by Tuesday afternoon.
Linked from that page was a helpful entry by blogger Amanda L. French, who compared the Terms of Service of Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, Picasa and YouTube.
"Conclusion? Go ahead and be outraged," she wrote, pointing out that the other sites gave themselves far less leeway in repurposing user material. "Facebook’s claims to your content are extraordinarily grabby and arrogant."
Some old tech-biz hands thought the kerfluffle was much ado about not much.
"It is common language in every website because their cut-throat lawyer says you need to cover yourself," privacy expert Jules Polonetsky told Agence France-Presse. "This doesn’t mean that Facebook can make a mini-series on your life or write a book about you, but they might be able to create a feed that lets your friends on Twitter know what you’re doing. Folks should just calm down."
"My guess is this isn’t a content-grabbing move by Facebook," wrote veteran tech journalist Paul Boutin in the Industry Standard. "It’s overzealous legalese meant to protect the company against copyright claims if Facebook uses content that has since been removed by a member. … I predict the old clause will be restored by Wednesday."
Still, this isn’t the first time Facebook has made its own mess.
In November 2007, a misguided attempt to make some money by targeting ads at users resulted in the "Beacon" controversy, named after the feature Facebook introduced without telling anyone.
Beacon partnered Facebook with several third-party retailers who tracked users’ credit-card use. But users were angry that their purchasing habits were suddenly being broadcast to everyone in their extended networks.
A month later, Facebook tweaked Beacon’s settings so that they had to opt into it rather than being automatically enrolled — a move it probably should have made in the first place.
Some commenters this week wondered why Facebook hadn’t learned from the earlier flap.
"You’d think one of the biggest social media companies in the world — one that’s dealt with outrage over privacy issues before — would have taken steps to avoid a publicity stink bomb like this," said the L.A. Times’ Sarno.
"Whenever my bank makes any changes to a privacy policy or interest rate, they send a copy of the new agreement in the mail," reasoned Sam Diaz on the ZDNet Web site. "Couldn’t [Facebook] have also covered its bases by blasting an e-mail to every user? … In this case, from best I can tell, that’s where Facebook dropped the ball."
