NASA - The Frontier Is Everywhere

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Youtube user damewse has grown frustrated with NASA's inability to communicate its message to the masses...so he made them a promo video on his own. From his youtube page:

I got frustrated with NASA and made this video. NASA is the most fascinating, adventurous, epic institution ever devised by human beings, and their media sucks. Seriously. None of their brilliant scientists appear to know how to connect with the social media crowd, which is now more important than ever. In fact, NASA is an institution whose funding directly depends on how the public views them.

In all of their brilliance, NASA seems to have forgotten to share their hopes and dreams in a way the public can relate to, leaving one of humanities grandest projects with terrible PR and massive funding cuts. I have a lot of ideas for a NASA marketing campaign, but I doubt they'd pay me even minimum wage to work for them. I literally have an MSWord document entitled NASAideas.doc full of ideas waiting to share. I thought maybe, just maybe someone might be able to work their magic for me on that. But the primary point of this post is to vent my frustration with NASA. Sure, they've fallen victim to budget cuts but I honestly think cutting media will seal NASA's own fate. Unless they can find a way to relate to the general public, support for their projects will always be minimal, and their funding will follow suit. A social media department would easily pay for itself in government grants because it could rekindle the public interest in the space program.



The Homeless Man with a Golden Voice

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Over the last two days, this video has went viral across the internet. Doral Chenoweth, a videographer for the Columbus Dispatch in Ohio recorded a homeless man at the intersection of I-71 & Hudson St. in Columbus, Ohio who has a voice made for radio. Watch the video below.

That video was posted on January 3. It is now January 5 and at the time of this writing that video has just over 4 million views. It has gone viral. All of the late night talk shows are talking about him. The NBC, CBS, and ABC news are covering him. Reddit has gone nuts, as they are want to do, going all do-good vigilante on him. Finally, this morning, he was on a Ohio morning talk radio show where he was given a job offer by the Cleveland Cavaliers. Recording is below.

He was also interviewed by the CBS Early Show this morning.

CNN's news coverage:

Web Analytics For The Past Year

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I've decided to publish my past year's statistics for public consumption. Note that my site doesn't get a ton of traffic. A few things I took note of:

  1. February was my biggest month of traffic until the end of September/October. We had two Blizzards in February which I blogged and photographed extensively. Capital Weather Gang here in DC linked to me several times which brought in a ton (for me) of traffic . September/October was when I launched HowToUseAnEscalatorInDC.com & HowToUseMetro.com.
  2. I get a metric shitton of robots hits whether from search engine crawlers or spambot scrapers. Google is #1. Spammers are #2. Yahoo is #3. Baidu is #4. Bing is #5.
  3. Chrome has almost caught up to Firefox.
  4. If you are one of the 19% who browse my website using IE6, please stop. Get off the Internet. You do not deserve to own a computer.
  5. Safari beats both IE7 and 8.
  6. More people use iPhones than Linux (haha).
  7. Nintendo Wii? Who was that? Someone I know, no doubt.
  8. OSX is almost up to 30%.