New Media Mania

Barack Obama’s fiercest rivals in the race to the White House have still not updated their LinkedIn profiles nearly one-year (51 weeks) since the historic inauguration of the 44th President of the United States.

Despite a fairly impressive new job title, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is still “Candidate at Hillary Clinton for President”:-

And if you were to believe their LinkedIn profiles, Republican Presidential nominee John McCain and his running mate Sarah Palin are still in contention for the top jobs!

Continue reading ‘Presidential Also-Rans Forget their LinkedIn Profiles’ »

This story proves that one doesn’t need a trillion dollars to mix it online with the big boys in your industry!

The ‘Responsible Tourism Guide to the Mekong’ at ExploreMekong.org/responsible has won the 2009 Pacific Asia Travel Association (PATA) Gold Award in the website category. And it cost little more than US$1,000 to design and build.

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID)’s ASEAN Competitiveness Enhancement (ACE) Project developed the site as part of its technical assistance to ASEAN- and Mekong-region tourism cooperation and integration.

Continue reading ‘Small-Budget Website Branded “Gold-Class”’ »

A new extension to MekongTourism.org and ExploreMekong.org, inspired by ‘The Guide to Responsible Tourism in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam’ will be launched into cyberspace by the end of March

In order to expand the potential readership of the book and the geographical coverage of its valuable content, the ‘Mekong Responsible Tourism Guide’ web section will be developed for the Mekong Tourism Coordinating Office (MTCO) by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID)’s ASEAN Competitiveness Enhancement Project (ACE).

MTCO Executive Director Mason Florence welcomed ACE Project’s initiative. “This is a terrific way for global citizens to learn about and comment on responsible tourism activities in the Greater Mekong Sub-region,” Mr Florence said. “We’re hopeful that this will help build the foundation for a new print edition of the guidebook, which will contain information about responsible tourism activities in all six countries of destination Mekong.”

Continue reading ‘Consumer Site to Focus on Responsible Tourism in the Mekong’ »

“Launched in October 2008, Global Reporter is an interactive Social Networking site Where YOU report and comment on current events. Global Reporter’s goal is to bring users from around the world together so they can easily express their ideas on global and local issues by sharing original videos, photos and text reports.” … from their About Us page.

I like this upstart competitor to CNN’s “iReport” and I am proud to host their advertisement on this site. Visit Global Reporter by clicking “citizen journalism” under “CHECK OUT” near the top of the grey column to the right.

Nearly had a heart attack in my attempts to turn this blog’s default permalinks into “pretty” permalinks.

If you tried to access New Media Mania over the last couple of hours you may have come across some weird messages.

At one point I had the dreadful thought that I may have to start from scratch!

Anyway, I figured it out in the end, which is what the brave new world of new media communications is all about.

Figuring it out and taking baby steps without a budget was the main thrust of my presentation yesterday to the Thai chapter of the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC).

FEEDJIT Live – Updating in Real-Time.

Just installed and now testing “Press This” in WordPress on my ‘New Media Mania’ blog: http://www.newmediamania.com

My neat little blog traffic widget FEEDJIT is honorary acting Guinea pig.

The “Good Tourism” Wiki is now available to the public.

And it is ad-free thanks to the proud sponsorship of ‘New Media Mania’.

The wiki is intended as a knowledge bank of updated theory, agreements and declarations, reports and guides, best practices, useful links and multimedia resources related to sustainable tourism and responsible travel (aka “good tourism“), contributed by travel and tourism stakeholders.

Everyone’s a stakeholder. That means YOU are welcome and needed.

Continue reading ‘‘New Media Mania’ Sponsors The “Good Tourism” Wiki’ »

PATA has just asked me to shut down its Sustainable Tourism Wiki.

Here’s the note from the Association I was asked to send to all registered users:-

Continue reading ‘PATA Shuts Down Sustainable Tourism Wiki’ »

I’ve been a little too busy (lazy) to post to this blog over the last couple of weeks.

So I thought I’d take a minute to test TwitterFeed and see how this blog post makes it into my Twitter feed and then, in turn, into my Facebook and Plaxo profiles.

Sad excuse for a blog post?

Probably. But this is New Media Mania: And a Gen Xer’s (lame?) attempts to understand Y!

It’ll be even more tragic if it doesn’t work …

Knowledge managers who would jump on the tagging bandwagon need to understand that there must be something in it for the user. People won’t tag something for the sake of it, or as a favour to the publisher.

In the case of Del.icio.us, people value the go-anywhere bookmarking functionality first and foremost. And being able to share their finds with their friends and colleagues is a secondary benefit that browser-based bookmarking doesn’t easily allow.

Another reason why people use tags is to attract others to their own content. For example, a user assigns tags to an article or blog on Technorati or a photo album on Flickr in the hope that someone else will find it among the masses of other user-generated content.

In this case, tagging is used to promote or categorise one’s own content, rather than promote or recall content created by others. Indeed this is the reason I have started to use Del.icio.us again. I have tagged my own blog posts to make them findable by Del.icio.us users.

Continue reading ‘How Can Your Audience Benefit from Tagging?’ »