ST. LOUIS (April 18, 2009) A girl loses a tick-tac-toe game to a Navy diver in a dive tank at Forest Park during St. Louis Navy Week. The event , which is scheduled for April 16-26, is one of 21 Navy Weeks planned across America in 2009. Navy Weeks are designed to increase awareness in cities that do not have a significant Navy presence. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class John Collins/Released)
INDIAN OCEAN (Sept. 3, 2008) Aviation Ordnanceman 2nd Class Jennifer Smolinsky, from Erie, Pa., works with other aviation ordnancemen assigned to the “Blue Blasters” of Strike Fighter Squadron (VFA) 34 to load an air-to-air missile onto an F/A-18C Hornet on the flight deck of the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN 72).
Lincoln and embarked Carrier Air Wing (CVW) 2 are in the U.S. 7th Fleet area of responsibility on a scheduled seven-month deployment.
(U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class James R. Evans/Released)
A hangup about robocalls
By: Josephine Hearn
Back in 2004, Fannie Mae executive Shaun Dakin quit his job and boarded a bus to Cleveland to volunteer for John F. Kerry’s presidential campaign. “I wanted to do something that would make a difference,” he recalls.
But midway into working the phone banks for Kerry, Dakin became disillusioned. “People would say, ‘I’m sick of these calls. I’m going to teach you guys a lesson and vote for Bush!’” The other volunteers were getting the same hostile responses. “We decided we could help the campaign more if we just went and got a beer,” Dakin said.
Three years later, Dakin has devoted his professional life to fighting the political campaign calls he used to make. It’s an unusual cause but not an entirely implausible one. A study by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press showed that 24 percent of voters nationwide had received robocalls as of early December, well before the real campaigning started. Of those, 65 percent said they normally hang up, and 24 percent of those who hung up said the calls made them “angry.”
And robocall technology is only getting more advanced. One firm told Politico that it can now place 1 million calls in less than a half-hour. “Some days, we call 10 to 20 percent of the U.S. population,” an executive at the firm said.
To combat the calls, Dakin launched a nonprofit group in October, the National Political Do Not Call Registry. “I thought, ‘I’m spent with red versus blue politics of the past 20 years. How can I be part of the solution?’” Dakin said.
Read the rest here:
Four US Newspaper Companies Form Online Ad Partnership
A new online advertising network will let advertisers book campaigns through a single point of contact, reaching 50 million people a month.
Jeremy Kirk, IDG News Service
Four major U.S. newspaper chains launched an online advertising network on Friday that will let advertisers book national campaigns through a single point of contact, reaching 50 million people a month across the U.S.
Investors include the Tribune, Gannett, Hearst and New York Times companies, which publish flagship newspapers such as the Chicago Tribune, USA Today, the San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Times, respectively.
The network, QuadrantOne, will let an advertiser place ads on hundreds of Web sites focused on 27 major markets, targeting users by what they are viewing, their online behavior and demographic information.
QuadrantOne is most notable for the online players that aren’t participants, such as Google, Yahoo or Microsoft. This latest move by the newspaper companies may be designed to assert greater control over their print and Web properties.
Read more here.
Lapel pins, like bumper stickers, are usually considered self explanatory.
When they provoke conversation, it is most often with like minded people.
Unless, of course, you have strayed into the wrong neighborhood.
Test question: have you ever lived with an alcoholic?
If your answer is no, then you can stop reading this.
For those who are still here, have you noticed the new trend of alcoholics promoting some new show biz project? They show up and do something outrageous, which gets heavily reported and talked about.
Of course there is this movie coming, isn’t there?
If this happened on a TV show, complain to the sponsors. Just tape the next show and fast scan through the tape to make notes on who the sponsors are (that way you don’t have to look at the show itself). Then Google the sponsors to find their addresses or web sites.
They will listen.
