The New Media

Germany Had Their Own Balloon Boy Hoax Last Month

All of Germany was bamboozled Thursday by a bizarre scheme that tricked the country’s main wire service into reporting an attempted suicide bombing in a California town — an attack supposedly perpetrated by a non-existent rap group called the “Berlin Boys.”

The work of German filmmakers peddling a satirical movie called Short Cut to Hollywood, the elaborate hoax involved at least two faked websites, a faked Wikipedia entry and California phone numbers for “public safety” officials that were actually being answered by hoaxsters in Germany using Skype.

The hoax has transfixed this country. It prompted a 1,000-word tome on the website of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Germany’s most respected newspaper, and even a press conference denouncing the incident by the DPA – the German wire service responsible for first disseminating the news about the “attack.”

The hoax’s effect was felt thousands of miles away, as a flood of concerned phone calls from Germany jammed the switchboards at the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s office, which has jurisdiction over the supposed bombing site in California.

“This is frustrating and a waste of our resources,” said office spokesman Arden Wiltshire, who was awakened at 5 a.m. Thursday to try and sort out the crisis. Wiltshire worries that dispatchers could have missed important calls to deal with the Germans.

“We’re sorry for what happened; we, too, were victimized,” said Justus Demmer, a DPA spokesman.

More details here… just shows you the power of the internet in media these days. Too bad that sometimes being fastest to the story means that you have the wrong story or no story at all.

Federal Government Considering a Cyberbullying Bill

You may have heard the name of Lori Drew in the news. She was the mother accused of running a cyberbullying scheme against a 13-year-old girl who was a rival of her daughter. Drew created a fake MySpace profile of a teenage boy who pretended to have a romantic attraction to Megan Meier. When Drew (as the fake profile) broke off their relationship, Meier committed suicide. The government argued that violating MySpace’s terms of service amounted to computer hacking, but the judge overturned the jury verdict and deemed she was not guilty. The prosecution is now considering an appeal.

HR 1966 (introduced by Linda Sanchez of California) would ban hostile or harassing speech in e-mail, instant messaging, blogs, websites, telephones and text messages with the intent to cause emotional distress. If the bill were liberally interpreted, I’m assuming that would open up about 85% of the internet to Federal indictments.

Lawsuits Filed Over Sidekick Outages

There was an outage earlier in the month of T-Mobile’s Sidekick service. Customers were previously told to back up their data before the outage, and it would be secure. Since the outage, some (but not all) customers have been able to restore their data.

I guess there’s two lessons to be learned here. If you’re providing a service and you’re telling your customers to back up data on your system, then you had better have a good backup and recovery system in place. On the other hand, if you’re a consumer of these services, then maybe it’s a good idea to backup your own data as well.

Add Some Polish to That Presentation

Check out a great before and after shot of a set of PowerPoint slides. The number of slides barely changed, but right from the beginning, you can see how awesome and eye-catching the second presentation is going to be.

Before:

After:

Hat tip to Olivia Mitchell.

Authors@Google: Garr Reynolds

If you have an hour or so over your lunch today, you should watch this presentation from Garr Reynolds. This is what a great integration of public speaking and visual slides looks like.

Eye Contact, Eye Communication and Eye Roll

See how destructive nonverbal communication can be in the following video:

Nonverbal communication undermined the team’s leadership, dissolved the team’s cohesiveness, and ultimately got someone fired.

Hat tip to Bert Decker.

Why Simpler Slides Win

A simpler interface is easier to use, so it stands to reason that a simpler PowerPoint slide is easier to understand as well:

Hat tip to Tony Ramos.

An Interesting Visual Aid

Jex Condom sales in Japan:

I’m not sure whether to be appalled by the creativity or applaud the creativity.

Tip (so to speak) to Garr Reynolds.

Did You Know?

I posted a similar video about a month ago asking whether or not social media was a fad. Here are some more figures in this video:

There’s a lot to think about here:

• Businesses that embrace the slow delivery of content are probably headed for extinction.
• The internet has broken open a brand new audience that watches television, gets information, conducts business, makes purchases and primarily communicates via mobile devices and laptops.
• Technology is often faster than the speed of common sense.
• Does what you see demonstrate that our sinful desire to have what we want right now is fueled by technology?

There are probably more things to mine from that, and maybe we’ll come up with some on Wednesday. I’m not trying to demonize technology, but I think that it certainly urges some caution.

Hat tip to Daniel Mosley.