Of all the incumbent telcos, Qwest is struggling the most — the western region telco is losing local lines at a rapid clip, has no mobile voice arm, is far behind in its high-speed service sign-ups, has a low-growth service territory and is still reeling from a series of financial scandals. It’s no surprise, then, that Qwest is stepping on the gas to sell the only growth product it has: high-speed service.
The company has ramped up a campaign to transform all employees, from service technicians to receptionists, into sales people. The telco has a “Spirit of Service” initiative that rewards any of its 40,000 employees with small commissions if they get someone to sign up for high-speed service. Verizon has a similar program in place in Texas.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 1:28 PM | Print | Comments (0)
Filed under the category of “things maybe we shouldn’t worry about” is this op-ed piece in today’s New York Times by writer Edward Tenner, who frets that Google’s search engine is compromising the intellectual pursuits of today’s students. His argument: Google’s citation analysis algorithms often churn up mediocre results and unsuspecting scholars might accept low-caliber resources instead of truly valuable fonts of wisdom.
Curious about the academic field of world history? A neophyte would find little help entering “world history” in Google. When I tried, the only article on the world history movement, from the open-source Wikipedia project, didn’t appear until the fifth screen and was brief and eccentric, erroneously dating the field from the 1980’s. (In fairness to Wikipedia, that entry has since been corrected and improved; moreover, the paid-access Encyclopaedia Britannica site has no specific article at all.) Only on the seventh screen did I find the World History Network site, financed by the National Endowment for the Humanities, and it is not yet a good portal for beginners.
Um, people who are truly curious about “the academic field of world history” are likely to be people who will dig deeper into Google’s results to find material that is sufficient meaty and interesting, something they were unable to do before the rise of Google. Tenner makes one good point in arguing for better “information literacy” that teaches students, specifically university students, to be better judges of search results. But let’s hope even absent information literacy that universities aren’t cranking out researchers who are unable to distinguish among the varying levels of web site qualities generated by Google searches.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 12:42 PM | Print | Comments (0)
The New York Times’ Dan Crane has this article today on the phenomenon of viral videos and the weird distribution loop traveled by these often-homemade short and amusing videos. The piece focuses on a VH1 hit program called “Web Junk 20,” a weekly program that shows web-delivered videos.
But, some of these videos traverse back and forth between the web and TV — one video highlighted in the article originally appeared on “The Jimmy Kimmel Show,” then jumped to iFilm.com and youtube.com and then back again to VH1.
What’s interesting is that TV coverage of web-based videos (there are now four programs on the air or in the pipeline that focus on Internet videos) is fueling the creation of more web-based videos. Even more intriguing is the prospect that this short-film phenomenon could morph into longer-form user-generated content.
With four viral video shows soon to be on the air, what’s the next wave of user-generated content? “One could imagine a next generation version of ‘Saturday Night Live’ that’s created entirely by the viewers,” Mr. Hirschorn speculated. “It might even be better.”Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 11:52 AM | Print | Comments (0)
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