(audio player after the jump)

Background

MTV, in their corporate wisdom, decided they needed a person to call a TJ (Twitter Jockey), and started a contest with various hoops through which to jump in search of the right person. The winner would receive a paying gig at MTV ($100k for year’s salary) and access to all kinds of fascinating people and information. To get more bang for the buck, they rolled out the contest with a promotion for an American Express card, and they setup a custom Facebook page and a special subsection of MTV.com with all the contest info and profiles of the twenty selected contestants.

The Contest Metrics

In the beginning, it seemed like an honest contest. MTV chose to use Edelman’s Tweetlevel score as the main number to watch, and that seemed like a great idea. The Tweetlevel score isn’t all about popularity, it scores a Twitter user based on trust calculations, interaction with others, and influence as well. The underdogs had a chance to shine, right? Wrong. While the Tweetlevel score was a factor, MTV (in the fine print) said that they would choose the five finalists based on other stuff, too.

The Five Finalists

It seems that MTV wanted the notoriety, but not someone who could really connect with people on Twitter. As soon as the five finalists were chosen, dissent could be heard all over the web. There were callouts of unfairness on Twitter and many negative posts on the Facebook MTVTJ wall (lots of which were deleted). Instead of the top five Tweetlevel scorers, the five finalists appeared to be the most diverse bunch that MTV could manage from the list. This fact alone made the selection process for the “contest” highly suspect, and not just to me.

The Winner

I’ve got nothing personally against Gabi. I don’t know her, but I followed her during the contest and she seems like a nice person (for what it’s worth, she did have the second highest Tweetlevel score when the five finalists were selected). However, her tweets usually consisted of emoticons or one-word replies to people, and her interaction with people didn’t seem genuine. She was meeting the metrics, but she wasn’t developing influence or building a rapport.

The Real Failure Here

While I’m happy that some non-celebrity won the contest (which probably seems like winning the lottery), I feel really let down by MTV. They had the opportunity to hire someone who really understands the concepts of building a rapport and being a brand ambassador, and instead they held a semi-fake contest with a credit card product tie-in.

This quote from an article yesterday on MSN sums it up pretty nicely:

Twitter is at it’s best when it allows an interactive, real-time flow of useful information. It’s at it’s worst when it’s used for poorly-spelled overshares about the minutiae of someone’s daily life. It was only Gregg’s first day on the job, so perhaps there’s room for improvement, but so far, it looks like MTV’s effort to build its brand on Twitter has a lot more to do with the worst aspects of the site than its potential.

• from MTV’s ridiculous $100,000 tweets

What do you think? Did MTV miss the point on all this, or do I have it all wrong?

Here’s the new version in a screencast, so you can follow along and try it out for yourself.

Here’s the link to Chris Penn’s original video, and the tools I use in the video are Twiangulate and TweepML.

So, after taking a peek into the settings area, I found the way to change it back to normal, and thought I’d share that with you in a screencast.

What I Was Looking For

• Lightweight. I didn’t want this one little feature to be the plugin that broke the camel’s back, as it were.
• Easy to use. It needed to be simple to install and even easier to use.
• Flexible. It needed to be able to fit into a variety of widget sizes, both sidebars and (potentially) widgetized footers.

The Solution

I came across this very excellent idea (by Go41 Webdesign) of using SimplePie, since it is already included with WordPress. There was no need to add a bunch of useless code to get information from an existing feed.

The problem was simply that of end-user experience. So I reworked the code a bit, wrapped it into a widget, and added the ability for the site owner to make changes right in the Widgets section of WordPress.

I may expand the capability of this plugin in the future, but for now I’m happy with it and I like the simplicity.

What It Does

This plugin is super simple. It creates a widget that you can drag into your sidebar or widgetized footer. Then, simply specify what YouTube channel to look at, and it will pull the most recent video from that feed and display it on your blog. I even added the ability for you to easily adjust the height and width of the video to fit into a variety of theme designs.

Get the Plugin

Download the plugin here

I’d love to hear your thoughts on it. Give it a try and let me know what you think.

OK, so my real motivation in this post is to keep from explaining the ending a thousand times. I’ve got work to do.

Yes, I think the world population is dumbing down.

With that said, I’m going to give my summary of the wrap-up in bullet points, so as not to confuse anyone.

• No, they didn’t die in the initial crash. Their life on the island was real.
• The flash-sideways sequences of the last season were more like limbo at some point in a timeless future.
• The answers to the island’s mysteries are irrelevant, which is not an unprecedented concept in good science fiction. Do we really expect to get all the answers in life?
• We all fight our own ‘monsters’ and try to escape from ‘islands’ all the time; those experiences and struggles shape our character.

The Real Ending:

For all you ending-haters out there, I believe you’re missing some key points. The ending was a real ending. Jack gave all to save the day, the bad guy was killed, and Hurley took over as protector of the island. A small group escaped in the plane and Jack had the satisfaction of knowing that he’d helped save a few folks, maybe even the world. The post-ending, or the afterlife sequence, is not the real ending. Call it closure, but it helps explain that some people died early, some people probably lived a long time, but they all were important enough to each other to warrant sticking together for whatever journey or transition came next.

The Allegory:

In my opinion, each of the island’s mysteries were symbolic of the stuff we go through everyday, in our real lives. We don’t really truly understand anything that’s happening, but we have to work through it anyway. In the end, we probably won’t get the answers. We’ll be left with the relationships that we’ve built and the communities that we’ve had, and we’ll realize that the small stuff didn’t matter. Not one bit.

Web accessibility is nothing new or glamorous, but it’s very important and often gets overlooked for various reasons. There might be time or budget constraints, fear of making mistakes, or just plain naivete about what accessibility means and how to get started implementing it.

Make The Commitment

It doesn’t take much. Add a comment to this post (make sure you include your Twitter handle if you have one), and tell everyone what site you’re going to improve. Then, commit to making one small accessibility improvement to that site each week. It can be a tiny thing, just do something that improves the site. I’ll make a Twitter list and a hashtag to follow so that we can all keep each other motivated and ask for reviews and tips.

Ideas To Get You Started

• Provide text alternatives for images
• Label your forms correctly
• Fix your line height and line width
• Evaluate the contrast of text versus background
• Provide keyboard shortcuts

Get Involved and Make a Difference!

If you’re a beginner and don’t know where to start, have a look at this article: “Getting Started with Web Accessibility” on The Web Squeeze.

If you’re a lurker, please take this opportunity to pitch in. There’s no need to hide; we’re all friends here.

photo credit

Today’s three are all about accessibility again, but this time I’m focusing on tools that will help you create more accessible sites. I personally use each of these, and find them very useful. This is not a sales pitch, either, as all of them (at the time of writing this) are free to use and platform independent.

WAVE and the WAVE Toolbar

From the WAVE site:

WAVE is a free web accessibility evaluation tool provided by WebAIM. It is used to aid humans in the web accessibility evaluation process. Rather than providing a complex technical report, WAVE shows the original web page with embedded icons and indicators that reveal the accessibility of that page.

Color Oracle

From the Color Oracle site:

Color Oracle is a colorblindness simulator for Window, Mac and Linux. It takes the guesswork out of designing for color blindness by showing you in real time what people with common color vision impairments will see.

Color Oracle applies a full screen color filter to art you are designing – independently of the software in use. Eight percent of all males are affected by color vision impairment – make sure that your graphical work is readable by the widest possible audience.

Odiogo

From the Odiogo site:

Odiogo’s media-shifting technology expands the reach of your content: It transforms news sites and blog posts into high fidelity, near human quality audio files ready to download and play anywhere, anytime, on any device.

When I was a young cook, I sometimes second-guessed my recipes, whether or not there were any complaints from the dining room. It was self-doubt, basically. I was young and not as confident yet as I would become in later kitchen roles.

One day, our CEO came in for lunch and I served him the special, something that I had been working on but lacked confidence about. I told him that I was unsure if it was too spicy and I was considering taking down the heat level a bit.

He looked me, grinned widely, and said “If no one’s complaining, it’s not spicy enough.”

That one thing has stuck with me all these years, reminding me that if you lower the quality of your work to the common denominator, everyone gets an inferior product. Go overboard sometimes and take risks. Some people will love it, some people will hate it. But you will be delivering your best work.

Flipside, a new series of interactive discussions from AIGA Blue Ridge, looking closer at the creative process of two types of designers with different backgrounds.

FlipSide—where different disciplines of design meet.

Whether planning a new building, inventing a new gadget or communicating your client’s message, the design process is crucial to solving the problem.