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THIS is real satire – Colbert at the White House Correspondents Dinner

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Take note, would-be satirists, THIS is how it’s done.

Stephen Colbert’s bit at  Saturday’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner (tip of the hat to Peter Caputa at PC4media, first place I saw it)

Other links of interest: Editor & Publisher’s report on the event; a number of threads on Atrios -start here.

See it on YouTube.

UPDATE 5pm: Two interesting posts by Peter Daou and Chris Durang on The Huffington Report about the major media essentially ignoring the Colbert perfomance, and focusing instead on Bush’s appearance at this event. I originally posted this item in awe at Colbert’s masterful performance. Funny, disconcerting, uncomfortable, courageous.

But given the way the coverage has played out, I think it will have far more long term impact than perhaps even he realized as he wrote his material.

As Durang points out, before C-SPAN and blogs, many of us (myself included) wouldn’t even KNOW about Colbert’s performance.  How important are blogs? What HAS happened to mainstream media? For a great essay on this, check out Lap Dogs of the Press by Helen Thomas in the March 27 06 issue of The Nation. Not surprising that she had a supporting role in the Colbert video.

I’ll be coming back to this.

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Explaining evolution to a six-year old

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Explaining evolution to a six-year old is not the smartest thing I ever tried to do, but so you have it. I was reading this post at PR-Squared which had this picture:

My son, home from kindergarten on Good Friday, is looking over my shoulder and chuckling at the monkey who turns into a man at a computer. Fool that I am, I tried to explain.

He listened carefully and then asked: "Mom, did you used to be a monkey?"

Uncle.

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Cleaning out my Bloglines Closet

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I read a lot of feeds, on a variety of subjects, and take advantage of bloglines "keep new" to save things to look at/blog later. When I’m busy, the "blog closet" gets pretty full, and quite often, many of the things I’ve saved for later are over and done with.

But some things are timeless.

Others worthwhile.

And of course, some things, you just know I am going to comment on.

Like character blogs.  At Beyond Madison Avenue today, Mack Collier writes that character blogs would be a good solution to carry on cancelled TV shows. You betcha. Just take a look at the sheer volume of fan fiction on the Internet.  I would still pay for a Whedon-produced character blog featuring the characters from the Buffy/Angel-verses.

Great advice from the Copyblogger. Writing about this week’s NY Times article "This Boring Headline Is Written For Google," which discussed the ramifactions of search engine optimization on the news business, he reminds us: "Write for people, people." Amen. We don’t need fancy footwork (or cute headlines) as much as we need clear, concise writing. A little time spent there can save a boatload of hassle, not to mention cost.

Bonus links

Two from Neville Hobson: a European business blogging survey and some info on search behavior

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Nobody and “just me”

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I’ve been beyond busy this week with my client Bid4Assets’ special auction next week, so this is the first time I’ve had to say for the record, I am more than happy to proclaim myself  a nobody. As Ike Pigott said, the company is stellar.

Once again (as I often am,  it’s amazing how many situations lend themselves to this),  I am reminded of Alice’s Restaurant (Arlo Guthrie):

"You know, if one person, just one person does it they may think he’s really sick and they won’t take him. And if two people, two people do it, in harmony, they may think they’re both faggots and they won’t take either of them. And three people do it, three, can you imagine, three people walking in singin a bar of Alice’s Restaurant and walking out. They may think it’s an organization. And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day, I said fifty people a day walking in singin a bar of Alice’s Restaurant and walking out. And friends, they may think it’s a movement."

And to some degree, that IS what blogging is. It is a movement, and it makes all of us nobodies, somebodies. I am both proud and humbled to be part of it.

Speaking of nobodies who are really somebodies, somebody I’m pleased to have gotten to know better in the past week is Robert French from the  University of Auburn. Robert invited Andrea Weckerle, Kami Huyse and me to speak with two of his classes earlier this week. Conversation ranged from the unfortunate PR character blogs to what it is like being a professional businesswoman to the issues/ills of the PR business to career planning.

 It was absolutely terrific to speak with the students. And we were all honored when Robert asked us to become contributors to Marcom Blog, a blog in which PR and MarCom professionals mentor his students. Robert, your students may have had momentary angst when you assigned their final projects, but I am sure they know how lucky they are to have you as a professor.

On a semi-serious note, to end this post:

When I phone my mum, I often self-identify as "just me." The other day, she called me on it and told me that "just me" was a pretty important person. Now, she’s my mum and she’s supposed to say things like that. But…. all joking about nobodies and somebodies and fake characters with delusions of grandeur (if you follow this blog you know who I mean), one of the things that I like most about blogging is that even a nobody is somebody to someone. All you need is one reader and you can make a difference.

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