Law and Order: Blog Monitor Force

I was watching Law & Order: SVU (the best out of all the spinoffs) the other day, and something stuck out to me. Mariska Hargitay is hot!...and so is the lawyer chick (the redheaded one, not Bobby Flay's wife). Ok...something else popped out at me too, the hired experts the defense and the prosecution both brought to the table in that episode. Each side spinning the spiel that blah blah blah blah blah....dang that lawyer is hot when she interrogates...what's the actress name...oh yeah Diane Neal.

Ok..back to the hired experts. One said, due to medical condition criminal wasn't responsible for crime, other said it was. Why did this stick out to me? It did because I was just thinking...if court cases can be decided on paid testimonies, what's preventing other outlets from doing the same thing? Such as blogs.

Blogs are mostly opinions and commentaries, but they're opinions and commentaries people listens to. So what's to prevent large corporation from hiring experts to write blogs in favor of them? or anonymously write a blog themselves?

We all know that ethics are in tatters in many American corporations. Every other fortune 500 company has been in a scandal where it could've been prevented if everyone followed the code of ethics.

Just a little food for thought while blogs continue to progress into the forefront of main stream media. Where blog celebrity can get their own Tv show, and blogs can bring upon a class action suit.

I Link Therefore I Am.

Rum, capoeira, and sunny california. Read the blog that gives you all that and more, Morgan's.

Emmy results and a "naked conversation" with the Emperor

So in between watching the cheating Patriots thrash the Chargers and an E! special on the top 25 most memorable swimsuit moments, I watched the 59th Prime-time Emmy Awards on Fox.

The Sopranos of course snagged a medley of awards including the one for Outstanding Drama series, which beat out one of my favorite show, Heroes. Heroes' Hiro (Masi Oka) also didn't win his supporting actor nomination, which was a bummer, but I was more upset at how incompetent John Madden was as a commentator when Masi was losing. However one of the thing that did catch my attention during the award show was Al Gore's CurrentTv.com's Emmy win for Outstanding Creative Achievement in Interactive Television.

Now I'm only a semi-Al Gore supporter, which pretty much means I voted for him in the last election, thought the Inconvenient Truth was a pretty good documentary, think it'll be nice if my car was a hybrid, and recycle when it's convenient. But that's not why his win caught my attention. It caught my attention because of how much CurrentTv reminded me of what Robert Scoble and Shel Israel was talking about in their book, naked conversation, which I'm currently reading for class.

Anyway, I never even heard of CurrentTv.com till I watched the Emmy tonight, so I googled it and found this article by Ellen McGirt of FastCompany.com that quickly updated me. CurrentTv is pretty much a cable TV network that lets the viewers pick or create what they want to watch on the network. A Youtubian TV network to put it simply. This expands the TV experience from the one-way exchange of information that it has always been, to direct interactions between network and customers that has never been done before in that medium. CurrentTv's manifest mirrors the current emerging corporate blogging scene talked about in naked conversation, where corporate bloggers and consumer bloggers can "interrupt each other to ask questions, make suggestions, [and] challenge arguments." It gives the big corporations a friendly, understanding face that is sorely absent in today's consumer market.

However imho, these big company need to realize that while these new means of interactions with the consumer is certainly good for business, they need to make sure that this new face they're projecting does not become a façade that does more harm then good. Case in point, I was surfing Hewlett Packward's website the other day, while checking for new ways I can contact HP customer service (read my previous post for reason), I found my way to HP's corporate blogs.

It's nice to see ethusiastic HP employees blogging about work and even what they do in their spare time, but many of the bloggers missed the whole point of actual dialoguing with the customers. If they said they won't dialogue, it would have been alright, but it clearly states in their Blogging Code of Conduct that they will. Now I'm not saying they have to respond to everyone and everything, but when there's a fair amount of comments on a blog that talked about HP inventing customer experiences, and almost all of those comments are challenging what it says, you would think that warrant some "dialoguing." But nope, no response. So rather than being a human face for the company, the blogs instead patronizes.

Alright, my head been hurting all day and I still haven't done my Japanese homework and it's due at 8:30 in the morning, I think I'm gonna go past out.

*edit

Oh...and I finally got hold of a case manager from HP the other day (Thank you God of Luck, Jesus, Mary, Joseph and Buddha!), apparently calling at 12:07pm (EST) on a friday is the best time. My laptop is gonna be replaced by a brand spanking new upgraded one, a compensation from HP for it being so lousy, however I'll need to wait 2-3 weeks for it to be build. So if anyone out there want a sweet laptop and you don't want to pay as much, all you have to do is buy a lower end laptop from HP, wait till it breaks down, be frustrated and aggravated for 3 months and BANG, voila, a new sweetass laptop! Oh...and that's only if you get through to someone important from HP customer service by the second month! Good luck, and good night.

Theories For Dummies: Things everyone know, but apparently there's a need for doctors to explain it to you.

I'm usually a very patient and calm person, but there are moment of late that I haven't been. These moments usually start with a phone call to Hewlett-Packard's customer service line, ending a hour later with me cussing at the dead phone like it just insulted my entire family including my dog and my hamster.

Why?

It's a long story, but the gist of it is that my laptop has been in service for 2 months and I still haven't gotten it back. Plus it would seem all the case managers in HP seem to be too busy to deal with me, despite me calling in the morning, the evening, the afternoon, the beginning of their shift, the middle or the end. They're so diligent in fact, that of the 8 times their technicians say they'll call me back, they have called me zero times.

I was reading the other day about network theories and I was thinking why are there even a field of study there? It seems like things everyone should know, things like how people connect to each another and how to make that connection better comes naturally. You don't need lines and diagrams to tell you why A and B connects and why C is left out, its human nature to know how social network works. Even a socially inept person knows the rules of social network, they're just people that aren't motivated or is afraid to change what's making them inept.

However after speaking (or not speaking) to HP customer service, I understand why there's a need for network theories. Because BIG COMPANIES apparently loses sight of how to maintain good relationships with their customers. If they can't even do that, how do they manage their own employees?

I'm not sure where I'm going with this but I'm gonna be back later and elaborate after I marinate on this thought a little.

Premiere Blog

Seeing how the name of the class is "six degrees" and my blog is doing it to the 6th degree, the Malcolm Gladwell article about Lois Weisberg (link) definitely perked my interest. Who is this women? and how is it possible for her to be the "connector" to so many different social groups? She knows actors, writers, doctors, lawyers, artists, park lovers, politicians, railroad buffs, flea-market aficionados, musicians, and the list goes on. What motivates her to be pretty much a human Facebook?

At the time the article was published, Mrs Weisberg was 74 and she was still meeting new people and trying her hands on new professions. She's an indomitable social networking machine and she reminds me of my grandmother before she had her stroke 10 years ago.

Before her stroke my grandmother was the social hub of the DC Metropolitan area's Chinese community. Still is actually, but just at a lesser capacity, as she is wheelchair bound now. I remember being dragged to dinners with political figures, various charity events, community gatherings, and plays when I was younger. Everyone knew her, whether it was our neighbor or the taiwanese ambassador, they always go out of their way to say hello to my grandmother when they know she's around. I'm always surprise at the amount of people that comes to greet her, and even more surprise at who they are.

I admire people like my grandma and Mrs Weisberg, not for their wealth of acquaintances but for their ability to move among subcultures and niches with ease. They're not only peripherally in different groups, but are well within the heart of every group they're in. They increase the "social capital" to every group they touch, they're the ones that everyone can trust, and they're the one that we should all learn from, so that we can benefit ourselves as well as our own community.

That's it for today, till next time,
Emperor Pete

P.S. Here's a list I found of almost 150 things you can do to increase social capital, the website also explains in detail more about what exactly social capital is. (BetterTogether.org's social capital list)