Olympic Censorship

MediaPost Publications Olympic Committee Sets Social Media Rules for Athletes 06/27/2011-read article

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) is protecting its advertisers and television sponsors while gagging Olympic athletes. The instructions from IOC are specific:

Postings, blogs or tweets should be in a first-person, diary-type format and should not be in the role of a journalist. Participants and other accredited persons cannot post any video and/or audio of the events, competitions or any other activities which occur at Olympic venues.

There is also a restriction on talking about the competition in any form of media. I think there will be confusion on the part of readers and viewers.  On one hand, we will see "anything goes" on the field and then we will read about "the Olympic spirit" online.

I do not approve of censure of media in any form.I think the athletes should be able to freely state their point of view and that would include analyzing their performance as well as the performance of their competitors.

In addition, some of the athletes may be coming to the Olympics from a country ruled by a repressive regime and this may be the only time they COULD HAVE written their true thoughts.

Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever. Noam Chomsky

What do you think?

The Twitter Developers Summit

The Twitter Developers Summit will take place in San Francisco on July 26, 2011. Everything is in the planning stages, so check out this website http://twitterdevsummit.com or follow @tdevsummit on Twitter.

The Twitter Developers Summit is the place for twitter-focused developers to network and become part of what Twitter will become in the future.HootSuite, keepstream, KLOUT, CoTweet and Bottlenose are putting together various lectures, panels, interviews and case studies on best practices, current trends and effective strategies in developing for the Twitter platform.

If you would like to get involved, submit a topic or present at the summit, send an email to send email to Tim at Engaged Digital.

Google Does Not "Get" Social Media

Google's ex-CEO Eric Schmidt has been talking out of school, sharing tidbits of information that Google would probably rather not have made public. Last week at the All Things Digital conference, Schmidt shared how Google had totally missed the rise of social media. I guess we can blame Facebook for their refusal to partner with Google for search. However, it is probably more the internal structure of Google at blame.

MediaPost Publications Why Google Doesn't Get the "Friend Thing" 06/01/2011

According to Eric Sass at The Social Graf (MediaPost):

. . . Schmidt reduces social media, in all its complexity, to a "friend thing," and imagines it as something to "do" -- rather than something to, say, build, cultivate, nourish, or grow. This tendency to simplify and objectify social media is still apparent in Google's strategy today, and it is the reason that Google will continue to fail to gain traction with its social media efforts.

Until Google realizes that you have to build a social network, not buy one, copy one or start one by adding a button to their blogs, they are doomed to fail at social media.  Note the lack of any social media site icons on the Official Google Blog.  Even on a post about sharing information on the web.