YouTube: Making Cheating Viral

I knew this would happen. Not to boast, but I did. Drudge linked to a story from The Chicago Sun-Times on how kids are spreading cheating tactics through YouTube.

From the article:
‘‘I know it’s not a good thing to cheat,’’ she said. ‘‘It’s academic dishonesty, blah, blah, blah. But I think everyone has at least done it once.’’

Kiki’s video is one of several dozen on the popular Internet site YouTube that show detailed ways to cheat on tests. Students no longer conceal answers in the sole of a shoe or the underside of a baseball cap’s bill. In the age of continual access to the Internet and laser-precision printers, cheating has gone high-tech.

And some techniques, like Kiki’s, come with a guarantee.

‘‘This is 98 percent effective,’’ she said. ‘‘Hopefully, any of my teachers don’t see this video. It would be very awkward.’

While this is a resource for students to discover new ways of cheating, it should also be a valuable resource for teachers. This is the information age, where you can learn about anything you want with a simple Google search.

The video below has over 2 Million views. With all the time that this kid spent making the video, he probably could have just studied and would have ended up knowing the material just as well without cheating....

Big Brother and Facebook

I used to think that everyone on facebook was being bombarded with ads for Arrested Development t-shirts and American Apparel. Not so. It seems that facebook monitors not only which ads you click on, but also your actual profile info to target ads to you. Information about the countries in which you access facebook also sticks; after living in France for 8 months I still get ads intended for French citizens applying for US visas.

My friend clicked on a link for meeting "cute, single girls", and now he gets ads for singles sites every time he logs in. So there's at least one downside of targeted ads, they may remind you of doing something embarrassing you'd rather forget :)

The Post Goes 2.0

We've come a long way since the '90s AOL chat rooms, now Washington Post is running discussions all day. It's essentially a moderated chat room, with expert hosts on sports, music, economics, politics, etc.

Great way to offer people a direct connection to the news and journalists, check out the one running right now on the Superbowl music line up.

You can find all of the daily discussions on the left sidebar of the Post's homepage.

Pitch Perfect: Simple and SMRs

Today's session consisted of two webinars which detailed both the simple and the syndicated. RSS feeds, Wikis, Embeds, and Hubs are terms familiar to the new SMR, though don't discount the simple tactics when pitching, as one of Axiom's well-rounded interns Annie Vanasek observed:

There are many things that may come as obvious to-dos when pitching a reporter. But it is always nice to be reminded of what you should and should not do when delivering your pitch. For example, I had already been aware of the importance of researching your reporter and knowing their beat before you try to pitch them, but today's webinar seemed to hammer it into my brain.

The three tips to always follow are:

• You should develop your story into something that would be attractive to them. With a creative mind, you can give them what they want while still making sure your news is covered. (At the same time, if you are having trouble figuring out how the two relate, then you probably shouldn't be pitching them in the first place.)

• Something from their archives that can be useful to you in your pitch. For example, if you are pitching a restaurant's new recipe and you discovered that they have included recipes in their past articles.

• The final one is a combination of the two. You can grab the reporter's attention by referencing one of their past articles, then telling them how you can help them with your story.

Social Media Releases
Now a new topic emerges, though it's not new to the PR scene. Hardly. Since its inception by Todd Defren, the social media release (SMR) can be a journalist's best friend. How tech savvy do you have to be to navigate it? If you can't navigate the web, a blog, or some other web hub, you'll likely have difficulty.

PR/Web 2.0 enthusiast Brian Solis led the talk about SMRs and they're feasibility for a new and improved online press room, and wired services.

Before I go into more detail, check out the conversation prism as I delve into many blogs on this topic, including Solis' own Web site.

Google Thinks You're Popular

Google has plans to rank social influence. They currently have a patent pending for technology that ranks your social influence on sites like Facebook and MySpace.

How it would work? This article sums it up:

"The new technology could track not just how many friends you have on Facebook but how many friends your friends have. Well-connected chums make you particularly influential. The tracking system also would follow how frequently people post things on each other’s sites. It could even rate how successful somebody is in getting friends to read a news story or watch a video clip, according to people familiar with the patent filing."


While this seems like it would turn into a high school popularity contest, this is also good news for advertisers. They will be able to seek out the most influential people in a group or niche, therefore having more targeted and effective ads. Also, I'll admit it, I would be interested to see where I rank among my fellow Facebookers & Twitterers.