Photojournalist George Payamgis shot this footage of the Harbor West Pier Lighthouse iced over by a combination of high frigid winds and the Lake Erie surf. My favorite view comes at :19 — it’s like something out of Harry Potter.
TIME magazine has named Mark Zuckerberg Person of the Year for 2010. Of course, you probably knew that already; anyone with a blog or a Web site is pretty much obligated to post and comment about it, so here’s my $.02:
If the conversation today on Morning Joe is any indication, this is a lousy decision. TIME’s Managing Editor Richard Stengel and the Morning Joe gang were basically crediting Facebook with cultural changes in the way people communicate digitally that would be happening anyway independent of whether Facebook existed at all. It’s kind of like crediting the company that makes copper wire for the cultural changes brought by telephone communications.
Maybe I’m tapping into my cynical side here, but if The Social Network doesn’t get made, Zuckerberg doesn’t get the nod; not even close. Plus, placing the figurehead of a Web site with 500 million users on your cover is a pretty good way to guarantee a decent single-issue sale.
Here’s TIME’s rationalization. And here are some links if you want to explore further coverage and comments from various outlets: BBC, Daily Beast, Huffington Post, Mashable, ReadWriteWeb, Salon and Slashdot. Weekly World News has their own picks, and you won’t want to miss The Borowitz Report’s take on it all.
I know this video’s been out since March, but if you haven’t yet contributed to the nearly 21 million views it’s received (as of this writing), you need to spend four minutes and do so. It’s pretty incredible. When you’re done watching, check out this Rube Goldberg site and learn more about the man who started it all.
At a time when magazines are struggling and folding all over the place, when print media is seen as dying a painful death at the hands of the Internet, it’s terrific to read this report that The Atlantic made “significant profits” in 2010 — profits quantified by Andrew Sullivan as $1.8 million. Salud!
eMarketer reports that in 2010, 73 percent of companies (with 100 or more employees) are taking part in social media marketing.
Which begs the question: What’s happening with that other 27 percent?
I’m thinking that either eMarketer’s numbers are off (can that many companies really be that blind to social media marketing these days?!) or these companies simply do not get it and are hopelessly stuck in the 20th century.
Takeaway for marketers: If your company is in the 27-percent category, realize that 100 percent of your customers are engaging in social media marketing — talking about you, tweeting about you, Facebooking about you and spreading tales of good and bad products and customer service.
