Today a tweet appeared on the Austin American-Statesman Twitter account that read:

Mention this tweet for Buy 1 Get 1 tix to area’s #1 haunted house - offer ends Sept 30. http://www.mansionofterror.com (Ad).

My immediate gut reaction was to recoil at the sight of advertisements on my newspaper’s twitter account. It’s journalism, dammit! The lines shouldn’t blur. But that’s also the idealistic part of me that doesn’t always realize news sometimes has to make money (not that it always does - rimshot!)

The Stateman’s advertising plan was laid out in this article. The ads have to be tailored and offer something — a specific discount — to the viewers. They can only be for food, drink, or local entertainment, and they’ll only run twice a day. I was most impressed that it had to be a service, hopefully so that followers will feel like their being offered an additional service instead of spammed.

The Statesman’s social media head, Robert Quigley, said these factors were very important to him when picking an ad.

“I really care about the Twitter community, and I know the community well. I won’t jeopardize that, and that’s why we are strictly limiting this to two tweets a day per account,” Quigley said.

Full disclosure: I know Rob and consider him a friend, and I can believe him when he says this stuff. I think that the Statesman has picked the best way they could to run this experiment.

That said, I’m not sure I would ever consider doing it on a news account. I feel that news accounts can deliver much more light-hearted feel on Twitter while still being informative, but you’re still providing a service and gaining your follower’s trust. I don’t want to feel like they are being mislead or being offered something they may not actually want. I even have problems retweeting things on my personal account if I feel it wouldn’t best serve my followers (or annoy them). And trust me, while I love my PR friends, this happens a lot. It’s up to each account owner to run their account as honestly as possible.

The Statesman has over 13,000 followers, and the Mansion of Terror paid $150 to reach them for Thursday. It’s not a bad deal, and from what Quigley says, he’s gotten a lot of questions, but mostly positive feedback.

“It has been mostly positive. People seem to understand that we’re a business and that we’re trying innovative things to remain strong,” he said.

I’ll be trying to get updated numbers on how well the ad worked from the Mansion of Terror, so stay tuned.

I finally had the chance to sit down with Fast Flip, the newest news reader creation by Google, and my feeling after 30 minutes of use was: why? But after another 30 minutes, it turned to: Ooooh, hey!

Google is trying valiantly to release software that will help the news industry, and I have to respect them for such a noble pursuit, but I can exactly understand how Fast Flip does that.

I started browsing on the general view, and ended up skipping over half the articles. That’s easy enough, but I don’t know how you’d keep people’s interest with that view. So I switched to just the view by publication, which was a lot cooler in theory, until I wanted to read more than two paragraphs of an article. I don’t mind being redirected, but why wouldn’t I just read the publication’s website? And if I’m using the mobile version, redirecting is a pain that I think would annoy some users (especially since Safari is one of the iPhone’s worst features).

Browsing by topic is again, nifty, and I suppose it offers me more of a preview of an article than Google news would, but what’s allure of not using Google News? I can hypothesize that you’ll get a wider variety of topics than Google News, which sometimes can narrow our worldview by only showing the top stories. It can also feature enterprise stories that magazine has worked on that will fly under the radar of top story aggregators.

It also has the ability to search on random topics. Some of my suggested topics included “Seattle”, “Japan”, “Beatles”, and “Politics”. It was kind of a different mix.

So overall, it’s mildly cool. The problem with tools like this is they need to be applied correctly in order to flourish. Hopefully Google will expand the number of publications using Fast Flip, and publications will figure out how to promote their Fast Flip presence, or better yet, figure out to make a similar technology for mobile apps of their own. That’d be swell.

To the bosses at the New York Times;

Two months back, you appointed Jennifer Preston as your social media editor. The internet was abuzz with excitement as to this progressive step on your part; as a flagship newspaper, it’s important to be a trendsetter in your field and to jump on the bandwagon, right?

Whatever Preston has been doing, I don’t know if I’d call it social. There is over a month-long gap in her personal twitter timeline (from here to here.) It’s almost if this Mashable post that called her out on her lazy Twitter behavior made her (or her bosses) realize that internet has her under its gaze. (Note that post coincided with the day she started tweeting again.)

Now with the New York Daily News‘ interest in hiring their own Social Media Editor, I have to wonder if these posts are actually being used to improve strategy. Has Preston improved social media relations for the New York Times that name recognition alone couldn’t do? So far, I haven’t seen evidence to prove so. (Meanwhile, my hometown paper is kicking butt with social media, after appointing Robert Quigley as the Social Media Editor.)

But I think, and popular opinion agrees, that a social media head should be visible on and offline. They should engage in discussions, follow people back, come to tweetups, and post thought-provoking tweets and blog posts. After all, the first word here is “social”, and if you take your personality out of it, what do you have? A glorified online editor sitting behind a desk who doesn’t know who their community is.

So I had the pleasure of interviewing the three founders of “Lights, Camera, Help”, Austin’s first film festival geared at helping non-profits gain exposure. The festival kicks off at the end of July, after a public submission period that lasted almost two months that garnered submissions from all across the country — and a few from other places too.

The idea man, David Neff, said he heard about health-related non-profits (Neff works for the American Cancer Society) wanting to do something similar, and he thought the idea should be expanded to all non-profits. He, Aaron Bramley, and Rich Vasquez all have non-profit ties as well as ties to film. Their goal was for non-profits to get the exposure, but also learn how powerful video can be to their organizations when used well.

While the submission process is closed, the three still have a lot to cram into the next month before they’re ready for the festival, which runs July 31 through August 1.

Enough from me; just watch the video I put together.

‘Lights, Camera, Help’ interview from Chelsea Stark on Vimeo.

To learn more, go to LightsCameraHelp.org

The internet is exploding with talk of the election protests in Iran. The information is almost inescapable on Twitter, yet many noticed the absence of updates on the story on CNN on Saturday and Sunday as it was breaking.

Really, CNN? Where were you? The problem with this is that is that if people revolt against CNN’s coverage (and some of the backlash was huge), then they’ll stop trusting their coverage and begin moving to non-traditional media outlets, like Twitter, Youtube or Flickr, to get updates on a fast-moving, riveting story like this. The problem with trusting sources like this is that some of their information can be unverified. One of the few major values of news networks is the fact they *should* have verified information; something like Twitter could be easily used to spread propaganda by both sides.

For all the moaning the mainstream media is doing about losing revenue, you’d think they would try to do a better job of covering serious issues, not dropping the ball perfectly into the hands of citizen journalists, practically sealing their fate as a dinosaur with little relevant to add to the story. Instead they should be combining both the new media tools, the technology and personnel at their disposal, and their access to tell the best story that clears up the facts and brings this situation into everyone’s homes.

That’s not to say that there is media fail across the board; the New York Times is doing a commendable job compiling the most interesting bits from the internet and converging it with their own reporter’s coverage. (Read some from their blog). A couple of notable twitter accounts include Change_in_Iran and PersianKiwi.

Often Watchmen is called one of the greatest comic books of all time, so good that it transcends comics and is an actual god-damned novel with pretty pictures attached. Fans of the award-winning comic have both clamored for and bemoaned the day it would become a feature film for 20 years, and Zach Snyder made it a reality.

As a true-blue geek, I viewed the movie with the same excitement and skepticism as most others; it’s clear that this was a task in the geek universe similar to Atlas’s burden, but it also must be palatable to a mainstream audience. It’s obvious that Snyder tried to essentially perform the splits over a gigantic fault line. If he failed in one way, he’d have vast nerd armies going medieval on his ass if he tarnished the legend; His previous directing effort of 300 might have been bad (in my own opinion), but it wasn’t nerd dogma. At the same time, he had to make something that was worth making and bring the story to life to a whole new generation.

The first task was tackling the humongous back story, and some parts of the movie did that brilliantly. The opening sequence during the credits was probably one of my favorite condensed chunks of the movie, which when paired with Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A Changin’” was a perfect fit for the time period and the longing for times past, which is a theme of the novel. (While writing this review, I’ve listened to that song at least three times.) Still, the movie is looong; it’s got 12 comics slapped into one huge trade with lots of text to cover, and it still (thankfully) skips some stuff.

The challenge of being true to the material was a bigger one, and many things were shot-for-shot lifts of the panels. I got chills when I saw Archimedes, the flying owl craft of the Nite Owl, rise out of the water next to New York City. And Rorschach, one of the most interesting characters of the book, was exactly like I imagined him to be, and he was expertly played by Jackie Earle Haley.

At the same time, while it was amazing to see some of my favorite scenes play out, I felt like the movie focused too heavily on the action of the comic book, and not the interwoven story and human drama as it played out. While everything on screen was faithful to the comic, it almost was so to a fault. First and foremost, Watchmen is not a superhero story; it uses superheroes and sci fi elements to play on the elements of human emotion, namely fear. Turning it into some dumbed-down action movie robs it of the powerful message, and while the message is still there, it’s somehow easier for the reader to let it digest when they aren’t sucked in by the flash and dazzle of the movie. There was also a lot of gratuitous blood. I may be a fan of over-blown action movies, but there is a time and a place for everything, and sometimes the subtlety of what isn’t shown is more thrilling than seeing a pool of blood ooze from beneath a bathroom door.

I don’t know how to feel about the entire movie. I wasn’t disappointed, but at the same time I feel like the cliche “the book was better” holds true in this case. It’s not because of any mangling of the story; I really feel that Snyder tried his hardest to do right by the fans — and the author, Alan Moore, who has snubbed the film anyway — but the comic simply is the best medium in which to tell that story. It’s fun, and worth a viewing, but doesn’t hold the same magic that the 20-year-old book does.

As a special note to all other fans of the book who were agonizing over it: the new ending does not suck. In fact, I really thought it added a lot to the story and kept the movie away from “goofy sci fi realm” while also avoiding spending too much time on the mysterious backstory. I may be called a blasphemious traitor, but it’s true.

Austin self-branded ‘nerdcore’ rapper Terp2It may need to find a new label for himself, because his most recent effort, ‘My Weiner Touches the Ceiling‘, is hardly nerdcore.

I’m not really sure what genre Terp’s music fits into, but after giving the album several listens, I feel almost like comedy-core could be an accurate term. Chris Trew’s background is in improv and comedy in Austin, and I feel that the music he makes is in jest, but I’m not entirely in on the joke.

It’s clear that Trew has fun with the music he makes - just take at his music videos. I can respect him for that, because isn’t that what we all want to do? At the same time, I miss the days of old when rap was still music and you couldn’t get away with just talking rhymes in front of a generic beat.

I don’t want people to think I’m a snob, but I think the addition of the label nerdcore just chaffes me the wrong way. To say that Terp is nerdcore is a stretch, because nothing about his rap is really nerdy - he may be a geek himself, but it’s hardly reflected in his music aside from occasional reference to his iPod or carrying a fannypack. Sorry, there isn’t a genre called ‘awkward-core’.

His songs themselves consist of pretty generic beats, which should never been musically discounted. But his lyrics and energy aren’t well-meshed to the music, and the songs didn’t leave me wanting more. Some songs, like the track “O”, had catchy ideas behind them, but didn’t quite make it from concept to catchy rhythm.

I should be watching Terp at a live show in Austin soon, so I’m definitely willing to give him a second chance. I hope that his on-stage persona brings something new to his rhymes.

This blog doesn’t even have a pulse; I don’t think it ever did!

My New Year’s Resolution, besides everyone’s typical one of hitting the treadmill more often, was to give this blog a fighting chance. Of course, now it’s Jan. 15 16 and I still haven’t written diddly. Oops. It’s a lot easier to flip on the TV or my even-more-neglected 360 than it is to open Wordpress, but hopefully this post won’t be the last.

While writing every day for my real web job drains my strength, I hope to at least find the time to bash 500 words into my mac’s keys. How do people get in the habit of doing this?

Here goes nothing… (well, hopefully it’s not.)

Everyone who knows me can tell I’m addicted to rock games. While more hardcore gamers may look down their nose at its fans, there is nothing more fun to me lately than banging around on my Rock Band drums.

I snatched up the first and second Rock Bands, but I was hesitant about Guitar Hero: World Tour. I feel like I need to pick a side in the music game war, lest I’ll be spending even more of my cash on peripherals, and that side seemed easy to pick after the soulless effort that was Guitar Hero III.

But now they have to go and make it hard. Harmonix promised additional free tracks after the release of Rock Band 2, so I was excited to see what they’d offer. And then they had to go and critically fumble. Who are they catering to with this track selection? Indie music fans… who probably don’t play video games? Nice job, Harmonix, don’t even try making it up to me with the Presidents of the USA pack - my heart is already wandering…

Because meanwhile, Guitar Hero: World Tour’s track selection is getting better. While only a few of the original releases pulled me in (Tool, 311, NOFX, and Sublime - all who are new to any games), they seem to have the right idea when adding new content, including the new Metallica album. I’m not sure if I can dig anything newer than the Black album, but I see where they are trying to appeal to, and I like it. You also can’t deny the truth behind Friday’s Penny Arcade strip. Still, GH3’s only real redeeming value to me was that their newest guitar beat Harmonix’s first Rock Band one solidly. That game didn’t hold a lot of replay value for me, which kind of defeats the point for a music game.

Am I going to pick up Guitar Hero: World Tour? Not yet, but I am wagging my finger at Harmonix, too. Hey Harmonix, release a 90s punk pack with more Bad Religion and NOFX, and I won’t say another word.

Wired’s gaming blog brought up a NPR report about the Halo book, where the reporter essentially trashed gamers and insulted their intelligence with back-handed comments. Sadly, this isn’t an exception to the media rule; gamers are treated as weird because, generally, the people that are making the mainstream news don’t play games.

When I got my Omeganaut news last year, I was at work at a local tv outlet owned by a giant megacorp. I was essentially laughed at by some coworkers for my excitement, and, no, I kept myself pretty restrained until I could go to the parking lot and actually freak out. Later, I had to explain to a couple employees what modern video games were like, and deal with back-handed remarks of “Well, I don’t let my child play those because I don’t want them to be socially inept.”

This is not an anecdote of the trials of being a geek in a non-geek world, because we all know that one. Instead, this is meant to show that those that report the news, especially on the local level, are not of the gaming demographic, and sometimes have no desire to understand that gaming demographic. I even live in the tech-savvy town of Austin, which hosts plenty of developers and publishers; I’m sure it’s worse for other places. They let negative examples influence their opinions, never trying to do any deeper digging. These are the people reporting the news! That’s their jobs!

My geek soapbox aside, what Joffe-Walt did is poor journalism, no matter what she was reporting on. She didn’t have what is sometimes called “fingertips” on the issue: basic knowledge that could lead to asking good questions and creating a strong piece. Instead, she chose to let bias form her story and her questioning, something that should be a lesson to any reporter.