Keywerx is Here

Last week we officially launched our new company, Keywerx.  It’s a merger of three solo-preneur companies–Weavers Total Media, Outerlimits Tech, and my company.
I am now devoting my full efforts to our new company, and that includes blogging.  For the past month or two I’ve dual-posted on both sites, but now I’m going to suggest that [...]

Google Buzz: What Say You?

Mashable says that Google has “has dropped a nuclear bomb whose fallout will permanently alter the social media landscape” with the launch of Google Buzz last week (February 9, 2010).
If you aren’t already clued in to Google Buzz, it’s an expanded function of Google’s popular Gmail.  Click the Buzz icon and see your friends’ posts [...]

Hard Lessons from eBay

This week eBay announced yet another round of substantial changes to its selling structure.  For the past few years, the mega online retailer has re-jiggered its platform and in the process made very few of its sellers happy.
I am a longtime seller on eBay, specializing in collectible vinyl records.  Ebay has long been known as [...]

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We Really Are the Media Now

Filed under In the News by rick on January 14, 2010 at 5:04 pm no comments

This past Tuesday (January 12) I was  on Facebook and noticed that one of my FB friends had joined the group WFBQ-JIMMY-MAD-DOG-MATIS SHOULD-NOT-HAVE-GOT-FIRED.

Huh, I said to myself, while also pondering the grammatical error in the group title.  Didn’t know that had happened.  How did I miss it?

I went right to Indy Star and the Indianapolis Business Journal to read more about it, but there was nothing.  Nothing at all.

Back at the Facebook page, there were dozens of comments of support for Jimmy, and even comments from Jimmy himself  (Be nice to Q95, he said.  He still has lots of friends there).  The page had been started way back on Saturday, January 9, at 11:52 am.  But there was no news anywhere else that I could find via Google.  So I blogged about it on Tuesday afternoon, and then, as I often do,  used Twitter to promote the blog post and the news.  Meanwhile, good old RSS immediately fed my blog post to LinkedIn, Smaller Indiana and Facebook.

It took until Wednesday morning (January 13) for the news to hit IBJ, and until that afternoon for Indy Star to cover it.  FOUR DAYS after the Facebook page was started, the mainstream media was finally on it.

My blogging about Jimmy’ s departure is an inconsequential piece to the story, because I don’t have a large readership.  Every bit of communication sends out its own ripples, though, and that is exactly why I auto-feed my blog to social networking sites, to extend the reach as much as possible.

What is huge is that the news got out on Facebook and people were jumping in to publicly support Jimmy Matis long before the news media was able to catch up and publish something.

That’s not a knock on our local journalists who do a heroic job in the face of great challenges.  It’s a reflection on the contemporary news cycle, as well as the increasingly limited resources at these media companies, as they struggle with their disappearing bottom lines.

It’s certainly true that Twitter and Facebook are proving to be the first–and sometimes only–means of communication when tragedy strikes, such as in Haiti. What’s just as significant to me is that it is no longer possible for big media to consistently deliver the news to the rest of us fast than we can deliver it to each other, even though our grammar may not always be up to par.

PS:  My best wishes to Jimmy “Mad Dog” Matis, a quality guy who I”m confident will land on his feet.

Jimmy "Mad Dog" Matis Fired by Q-95

Filed under In the News by rick on January 12, 2010 at 5:08 pm one comment

News of this is just now breaking, but apparently it happened at the end of last week.

Jimmy “Mad Dog” Matis, mid-day voice of WFBQ Q-95, has been let go after a mere 25 years at the station. That’s an eternity in radio.

This follows sports talker JMV’s abrupt departure from sister station WNDE and his subsequent replacement by old Q hand Mark Patrick. Matis had filled in for JMV during the part of the transition.  Hard to believe there is not a relationship between these changes and Matis being shown the door.

Supporters have started a Facebook page in protest.

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