I would like to coin a new term, “Getting You Tubed.” I don’t know if someone has already coined a similar term, but I will take credit. When that means is that you do something bad that would have been buried in your regional news 3 to 4 years ago, but now because of You Tube and other web 2.0 technologies, the story goes huge.
The most current example is Congressman Pete Stark from California. The conversation went like this: Senior Citizen to Congressman Stark: “Don’t pee on my leg and then tell me it’s raining.”
Congressman Stark’s Response: “I wouldn’t dignify you by peeing on your leg – I wouldn’t waste the urine”.
Before YouTube, this comment maybe would have made the pages of a paper in California, but now it is a national story I heard about on a NPR’s Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me quiz show, all because of YouTube. I think this is an example that shows that all public figures need to be on notice, that if you say something unprofessional or beneath your level, it will get noticed and it can travel across the globe.
But, of course there are those who do not use Twitter wisely and get themselves in trouble. There is the infamous story of the person who got a job offer from Cisco and tweeted about it and, seemed to lose the job. It went down like this:
Even after this, you still see an amazing number of people post negative comments about their work place and other situations on Twitter. I think part of the problem is that people don’t realize how big Twitter is becoming and they don’t realize how public Twitter can be if their profiles are not set to private.
Well, now we are getting to a point where people are being sued over their tweets. I guess this was inevitable, but we entering into a new dimension of the Web 2.0 world. Here is the summary of the story:
Now, we know that Horizon is a “sue first, ask questions later kind of organization,” so I don’t want to get in trouble with this post. (Although this philosophy makes me think the tenant probably was in the right here.) But rather I’d like to talk about the idea of being sued on the internet.
Since this company filed a suit, I looked up what exactly what libel is to see if this was justified:
So, technically it seems this lawsuit would fall under this category. One aspect I am unsure of is if a company can file a libel suit. The FAQ above mentions when a person is wronged, but maybe it can go either way. In this case, the comment was made about a company. But, in this case the statement was definitely made to more than one person and it was clear who the comment was about. The question I guess would come down to whether or not there was mold in her apartment and if Horizon did anything about it. (Was the statement false or not?)
I think what blows my mind is the mindset of the management company here. Now, this tweet happened on May 12th, and the lawsuit happens two and a half months later. That seems odd. Why bring it up now?
Next, this news story, and their law suit is doing more damage, in my mind, to their company’s name than that tweet, that I never saw, ever did. I got the impression from the story that Horizon doesn’t even really care or want to address if there was mold in the apartment or not. Maybe this tweet was necessary and accurate. Continue Reading…
Last week I attended the Illinois Computer Educator’s (ICE) Conference in St. Charles, IL. This is the second year I attended the conference. Last year, I went to a pre-conference workshop on how to use pivot tables in Excel, which was interesting, but this year I attended the actual conference. They are many sessions to choose from, and I chose to focus mostly on sessions about new web 2.0 tools (which aren’t all actually web 2.0) and how to implement them.
On a side note, I would like to define web 2.0. Web 2.0 technologies are technologies that utilize two-way information. Continue Reading…
