Category: social networking

POP! PR covers the changing media landscape

Jeremy Pepper over at POP! PR is doing a bang-up job covering a big corporate communications event sponsored by Cisco. He shares some thoughts from a panel discussion on the changing media landscape featuring some Silicon Valley A-listers like Dan Gillmor. The money quote, from my perspective, comes from Gillmor:

All your corporate sites are media. Monetizing audiences is traditional thinking, and what is now is that you need to assemble a conversation and community, and monetize directly or indirectly. It will be useful in a non-business model way. What is being done is that corporations are creating media, and would love it if companies approached the sites like citizen media, with the tenets of traditional media.

There are those two C words again: conversation and community.

USphere meets TechCrunch

Glad to see a member of my blogroll, USphere, get a nice writeup on TechCrunch on Tuesday. (Actually it wasn’t the blog on my blogroll that got the writeup, but the startup company of the same name.)

As TechCrunch puts it:

Usphere lets students fill out a single application and be considered by their network of colleges. When you’ve completed the application, it’s tossed into their applicant search engine and only accessible by the 33 schools in their network. If a school likes you, they email you an acceptance letter complete with a bottom line price tag to attend. The application service costs $65, although they have several free college search tools.

Interesting timing, in light of what U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings has been saying about the need to simplify the “Byzantine” financial aid application process.

Spellings criticized the cumbersome federal financial aid application process, calling it “redundant, confusing, Byzantine and broken … a maze of 60 Web sites, dozens of toll-free numbers and 17 different programs.”

Maybe USphere can try to help Secretary Spellings develop the killer financial aid app app.