Wednesday, August 29, 2012

A Picture Worth A Thousand Words

The man who captured one of the most powerful images of the Vietnam conflict has passed away. Malcolm Browne, 81, died on August 27th at a New Hampshire hospital. His timeless image will live on. Mr. Browne was a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter for The New York Times. When he took the famous picture in 1963, it shocked the world, and its power reached all the way to the White House where President John F. Kennedy began to reevaluate the role of the United States in Vietnam. According to an interview in Time magazine Mr. Browne described how he was able to capture the image:
"The monks were telephoning the foreign correspondents in Saigon to warn them that something big was going to happen. Most of the correspondents were kind of bored with that threat after a while and tended to ignore it. I felt that they were certainly going to do something, that they were not just bluffing, so it came to be that I was really the only Western correspondent that covered the fatal day."

Sunday, August 26, 2012

Republican and Democratic parties say, "Please Like Us".

 

The upcoming Republican and Democratic National Conventions will be more intertwined into the fabric of Social Media than any other political conventions in the nation's history. If you doubt that then consider this - Google is the "Official Social Media Platform" at the Republican National Convention. Got your attention? Yahoo! will team with ABC to stream live coverage of the event online. There will not only be a media "War Room", but a "Social media Green Room". Teams from Facebook and Google will be roaming the floor to help people upload content and interact over the internet. Does this bode well for the American political process? I'll Google the answer and get back to you.