Kathlyn Clore

Why didn’t I think of this?

After reading the first paragraph of this Advertising Age story about a pharmaceutical company petitioning the FDA to use its logo as a marker for social media posts that contain safety information from the Food and Drug and Ministration, I see the first possible solution to the FTC blogger restrictions has been suggested.

Kitemarks . As defined by Paul Bradshaw of the Online Journalism Blog, they are:

“… a symbol (expressed visually, and electronically as metadata) to convey to audiences, bloggers, journalists and others that a piece of news content had been intelligently labelled with relevant information and that it is open to derivative checking/use… similar in a sense to the Creative Commons ‘mark’ that travels with media content across the web.”> “… a symbol (expressed visually, and electronically as metadata) to convey to audiences, bloggers, journalists and others that a piece of news content had been intelligently labelled with relevant information and that it is open to derivative checking/use… similar in a sense to the Creative Commons ‘mark’ that travels with media content across the web.”

Could bloggers or other online creators who have received free products or services to review use a kitemark on Twitter, Facebook or their blog to indicate that they received payment?

Inserting a kitemark seems like an easy standard operating procedure for folks who craft and who read sponsored reviews. And it should be easy enough for regulators to search for this.

If it could work, by what procedure would society learn about this mark? And could someone make money by creating and marketing such a mark?

Money, maybe not… But reputation, probably. This seems like a good project for the Creative Commons folks, like Joi Ito, to discuss.

In honor of my sister arriving from Chicago today to run the Big Sur Half Marathon with me here in Monterey, California, here are two viral videos depicting the City of Big Shoulders.

First is a time-lapse sequence of bridges raising over the Chicago River:

This one shows the view from an El train circling the city. It is actually a TV commercial for Budweiser, but is mainly cool for the song (a Beatles ditty sung by The Hours) and views:

Earlier this year, I had the good fortune to visit Lisbon for a lovely long holiday weekend.

Portugal is now home to one of the more interesting newspaper startups (yep, you saw me put those two words next to each other) I’ve read about, called i.

Peter Preston briefly profiled it in The Guardian at the start of October. The Editor’s Weblog, in Paris, profiled it last week and the NYT took note yesterday.

Here’s a video - with English subtitles - showing a “day in the life” of the staff at i:

What makes i an interesting product?

Its magazine-style layout, for one, with bold colors and lots of cutouts. It’s design is so nice, in fact, that the Society of News Design recognized it as the best designed newspaper in Spain and Portugal.

Second, its information architecture is radically different from that of a traditional serious daily. From the NYT:

“So i puts the op-ed pieces at the front of the paper. They are followed by political, business and other news stories — all jumbled together, rather than separated by subject. An article on a political scandal in Lisbon could appear alongside a piece on a Wall Street deal, for example.

“We approached the design from the way the reader thinks, not the way editors think or the way newsrooms are organized,” Mr. Avillez Figueiredo said. He said research showed that readers paid little attention to distinctions between sections and simply looked for the most interesting headlines.”

I completely agree with Figueiredo’s perspective here: When I scroll through my RSS feeds, Twitter or even a destination site like NYT or WSJ, I am always looking for the most interesting headlines. Increasingly, this tendancy is starting to translate to how I read printed newspapers.

So far, circulation and subscription figures at i look good.

I know I’d love to read it.

I think most Europeans will cringe as they watch this.

Why? The citizens of Europe who I know just can’t - for whatever reason - ever seem to just surrender to the tacky but warm embrace of sweet, tinkling music playing beneath images showing patriotic moments. This is in stark contrast to their star-spangled, American friends who tend to get teary anytime they hear Ray Charles croon America the Beautiful.

One Greek tweeter I am following referred to this video as “touching but contrived.”

In my opinion this is a very well-done video montage. It might be a little tacky, but the images and theme don’t seem to me at all contrived. It shows the life of a young family living alongside defining moments in recent history about which Europeans should be proud, especially those working toward a pan-European identity.

The interactive timeline here is also nice (and less cheesy).

I think some of the reluctance on the part of EU citizens to embrace moments like this as positive developments toward a pan-European identity stems from a generational gap. But from what I can tell, the Erasmus movement and the emergence of English-language publications around Europe - many of them cooperative efforts - indicate a growing EU identity.

Some media products conveying a pan-European mentality (and of which I’m aware) include:

Th!nk About It (Europe-wide blog platform on sociopolitical issues)
Cafe Babel
PressEurop
Spiegel Online
The NRC Handelsblad (Dutch) partnership with Spiegel and PolitikenDK (Danish)

I see no reason why this newsworthy and educational video segment, shown on ABC7 news in Washington, should spur the ire of anyone from angry parents to the FCC.

The news report, shown at the end of a national awareness month for breast cancer, depicts a victim of breast cancer giving herself a self-exam, with a doctor narrating and consulting. It is indeed slightly uncomfortable because of the personal subject matter. But it depicts what breasts in a way that must surely be easy for cancer sufferers to relate to: dealing with their breasts - so often seen by society as sex objects - as clinical objects to be poked and prodded by medical professionals.

I don’t know why some viewers want to pretend breasts and or cancer are not facts of life. But that’s what two Canadian women found earlier in October when a public service announcement video they produced to promote a charity event in Toronto called the BoobyBall that benefits breast cancer research.

As explained in this interview, the two women behind the ad and corresponding fundraiser are are marketing their efforts to young (attractive) philanthropists. Fair enough.

I liked very much this graf from a Newsweek article about the video:

“…Dennis Durbin, an associate professor at the Annenberg School of Communications at USC, ‘While the ad does push the boundaries a bit for a serious subject, note that beautiful women displaying large breasts are used to advertise everything from beer to cars,’ he says. The ads are a welcome contrast both to traditional ads that use sex, like beer ads, and to traditional perceptions of women with breast cancer, who were once seen as diseased and unworthy.

‘This ad takes women’s breasts back from being an object to sell products to being a symbol of beauty and life, something worth protecting.’ ”

I’m really sorry to those of you who either:

Miss Earth contestants and their inability to use correct capitalization

1. Have native languages that call for capitalization of all nouns (This means you, Deutschland!);

2. Learned to speak MySpace before English.

Still: the awful Internet tendency to either capitalize or lowercase random words which should not be not capitalized or lowercased has to stop. Please.

I’m normally not a stringent grammar person. I thank goodness I have found the Grammar Girl podcast series (which is, happily, very searchable) so I can find quick and dirty tricks to help me remember how and when to use “comprise”. And I probably have to turn to my AP or Guardian (or EJC, or European Commission, or Times, or or or!) more times than I should.

But the capitalization issue, along with random or missing articles (the/an/a) are driving me crazy in an editing project with which I am currently busy. I’m editing what is essentially a series of encyclopedia articles about media conditions in a particular country, all written by non-native English speakers.

I thought Mario Garcia asked a great question on his design/innovation blog when he asked, “Do we associate all things Internet with lower case?”

This question, and Garcia’s redesign of the Daily Handelsblatt, a German newspaper, sparked a series of posts about whether the paper should use a logo with an uppercase “H”.

I most liked these two quotes Garcia posted on this topic:

From Oliver Reichenstein, lead designer of zeit.de, tagesanzeiger.ch and krone.at: “Yes, many internet users believe that internet is all about ‘lower case’ as the urls are fed so, therefore anything that is associated with it should reflect it. I think the truth is while the url in ‘lowercase’ is only a function of the medium, the internet, where the information being served, it has nothing to do with the branding of the Online product. On the contrary the Online property is best represented with a look that can then be extended to other areas and in this instance by the square in the brand colour and the cap ‘H’ - a direct take-out from the brick and mortar presence of the product.”

Also, from Rodrigo Fino, Garcia Media Latin America/Buenos Aires: “Lowercase was used because of technical restrictions years ago. Today all internet browsers and email programs understand uppercase.”

Exactly! So regardless of technology, branding or generational differences, can’t we all just go ahead and just embrace correct usage of English, which does not call for capitalization of anything other than proper nouns? Please?

Even online!

I love the “Get the lab” remark at the end.

Problem is, this is just a cute skit. What does it have to do with Jim Beam?

Scroll through the comments at this AdAge brief. They indicate Jim Beam has terminated its contract with the agency that produced this.