Monday, February 25, 2008

Bravo, Marion!

Last night, my friends and I huddled around a gigantic bowl of popcorn and a bottle of wine to watch the 80th annual Academy Awards, or the “Superbowl for Girls,” as we have coined the important event.

We start watching at 6 p.m. sharp with the red carpet pre-show on E!. The dresses, the hair, the makeup—it’s a delicious feast for our eyes as we methodically critique or applaud every starlet’s attire. The actual award ceremony proves to be just as entertaining; watching celebrities introduce and receive awards never seems to bore us, and the delightfully crafted movie montages momentarily inspire us to become film connoisseurs.

The highlight of the night for me, however, was Marion Cotillard's win in the Best Actress category for her performance as Edith Piaf in La Vie En Rose. If you haven’t yet seen this movie, you must. Cotillard is incredible as Piaf; she has the ability to transform her appearance and behavior from a pulsating young twenty-something to a frail and decrepit old woman on her deathbed.

Cotillard’s win makes her the first and only winner of an Academy Award for a performance in the French language. She is also the first Best Actress winner in a non-English language performance since Sophia Lauren’s win for her 1961 performance in Two Women, according to my trusted friend Wikipedia.

Oscar nominated films from France won an additional two Oscars last night, making it the most number of wins ever for the country. According to the Website of TV5, France’s premier television station, La Vie En Rose, or Le Môme as it is called in France, was the umbrella movie under which other French films nominated for the event could be popularized. What's more, France's record number of wins at the Academy Awards marks a pivotal moment in French cinema history.

To such a steadfast Francophile like myself, Cotillard’s Best Actress win made me tremendously happy. I’m glad to see that the Academy is willing to bear through reading subtitles and give movies (and the actors who give them life) a fair chance.

Thursday, February 21, 2008

Black is the New White

In 2006, former Vice President Al Gore’s compelling documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, was released, spurring an unprecedented interest in environmental awareness. The film documented evidence for Earth's global warming epidemic and exposed the grim consequences that humans will face should they choose to ignore the situation.

Ever since then, it seems we have all become a little obsessed with “going green”. We are bombarded with environmental messages in TV shows and commercials, in the speeches of political candidates, and even on social networking Websites such as Facebook and MySpace.

We get it. We’re supposed to save energy, recycle, and cut down on our greenhouse gases. But if you’re like me, you may still wonder: how can a lowly individual such as myself really make a difference?

Turns out, you can go green by going black.

In January 2007, a blog post titled A Black Google Would Save 750 Megawatt-hours a Year on the green computing Website EcoIron proposed a theory that having black version of the popular Google search engine would save quite a bit of energy.

Enter Blackle.

Blackle, a search engine with a completely black background and powered by Google Custom Search, functions essentially identically to its white counterpart. However, Blackle saves energy because its background screen is black. According to the EcoIron blog, a black screen uses only 59 watts to display, while a white screen needs 74.

Google, the most popular search engine on the Web, gets a whopping 200 million queries a day. Assuming every Google user switched to Blackle, this would save 8.3 Megawatt-hours a day, 3000 Megawatt-hours a year, and about $75,000 in yearly saved energy. Blackle has recently been gaining momentum by making cameos in numerous environmental and technology blogs, including Treehugger.com and even The Wall Street Journal online.

So, the next time you search, I urge you to give Blackle a try. Blackle lets you do your part—albeit small—to save the world. In the long run, it could also help save you money (gasp!) by lowering your energy bill. Win-win situation.

Blackle is still relatively new undiscovered in the Internet world. However, Blackle has the possibility to become an Internet phenomenon. Imagine the energy that could be saved if all Websites changed their background to blackit's almost inconceivable.

Since its release in 2007, Blackle claims to have saved 473,025.553 Watts. For now, it trudges along, picking up new users daily and pushing its slogan: "Blackle.comsaving energy one search at a time."

Thursday, February 14, 2008

Praising Pando

Hold on to your laptops ladies and gentlemen, the Internet has just gotten a bit faster.

E-mailing large files on the Internet is no easy task. Sure, with a high-speed cable or wireless connection, we can watch small video clips instantly on YouTube and download songs in a matter of minutes. But most of us at somepoint have been forced to stare at the computer for minutes, possibly even hours, while we’ve waited, bored and frustrated, to send a large file attachment to a friend or associate. Have you ever dreamed of having the ability to send an entire CD’s worth of music or even a movie to another within seconds? Pando makes this a reality.


First released in 2006, Pando is a free peer-to-peer media distribution software that allows users to easily (and quickly) share their media content with their e-mail: be they video, audio, or data files. Users must simply go to Pando’s website (http://www.pando.com/), and download and install a small software program. Pando’s secret is not compressing your file; rather, it adds a small, “.pando” attachment to your e-mail, which allows the recipient’s computer to locate the original file on your computer and download the file within seconds.

Don’t let the technology jargon confuse you. Simply stated, Pando allows you to e-mail up to a gigabyte at a time—enough for hours of video—in a matter of seconds. Pando also enables users to post large media files to a blog, MySpace, Facebook, RSS feeds, and more. The possibilities that Pando presents the media world with are endless; video news releases, public service announcements, and even news broadcasts can now be accessed and shared immediately, allowing corporations to send out messages as fast as they can create them.

What’s more, Pando has recently redefined Internet TV. For free, users can subscribe to and share Internet television shows, hosted by such cable big-wigs as CNN, ESPN, E!, and the Discovery Channel. Pando automatically downloads and notifies you when they’re ready to watch.

“If you’re tired of bounced e-mails, and of using Web sites to share your personal videos or photos, Pando is a straightforward solution that anyone can understand in a matter of minutes. It’s a great solution to a vexing problem,” says Wall Street Journal technology reviewer Walt Mossberg.

Pando, though still just an infant in the Internet world, might just transform the Information Superhighway into the Information Autobahn.

Monday, February 11, 2008

It's a Complicated Relationship with Facebook

Today, the New York Times online posted this intriguing article about the permanence of a Facebook account. Turns out, even if you deactivate your Facebook account, or remove yourself from the Website, your account isn't really gone. Actually, it lies dormant, simply in a sort of "internet hibernation" until--or if --you ever decide to reactive it sometime in the future.

So what? Lots of people decide to deactive their account. Maybe they're in the process of applying for jobs, or law school, or maybe they've decided they're simply "too old" to be Facebooking. On the plus side, if your account is deactivated, your name won't turn up on any Facebook searches, and your profile is inaccessible. However, any footprints you might have left during the span of your Facebook life remain visible; other Facebook users can still view wall posts, messages, and groups you created.

Therein lies the controversial problem. While deactivated, your account is "on pause", not decisively deleted for all time. In theory, I could deactivate my account today, and return to Facebook at the age of 75 and my profile would be the exact same as it is today, a reflection of my current life as a college senior. But what if I never want to see my profile again? What if I wanted to remove all traces of my activities on Facebook? According to the article, completely and irrecovably removing oneself from the Website is an utterly cumbersome procedure that, until several months ago, was virtually impossible. Today, thanks to a number of protests by Facebook users and a petition at MoveOn.org, it is now a feasible--though still complicated--process.

Before permanently deleting a Facebook account, one should remember that it is an irreversible process. By taking the less dramatic route of deactivating your account, you get not only the benefit of increased privacy and knowing your profile can no longer be accessed by other Facebook users, but also the satisfaction of knowing you can resuscitate your latent account at any time.

If you choose to permanently delete your profile, you could in effect erase engraved memories of your life. You would never burn your high school or college yearbooks, so why would you erase all of the your photos, messages, and groups which have catalogued your youth?

Thursday, February 7, 2008

Getting Ink

You’ve just written the most fabulous press release of your life. It’s concise, yet efficient, and you’ve somehow made the opening of Joe’s Cynderblock Store seem like the most groundbreaking event of the century. Bravo, you’ve just completed the easy part of the publicity process. Now you must face the jungle of media reporters and editors in the public relations practitioner’s constant struggle to get ink.

Yesterday, Victor Godinez (vgodinez@dallasnews.com), business reporter for the Dallas Morning News, was a guest speaker in my Communication Campaigns. He offered valuable insight on the daily life of a news reporter for a major metropolitan newspaper, and gave our class of public relations majors a rare look into the mystifying inner-workings of a reporter.

Godinez said that he gets more than 400 e-mails a day, most sent by public relations professionals trying to get a story for their clients. He admitted that he deletes almost every e-mail that does not have “Dallas”, “Fort Worth”, or any other metroplex suburb in the title line. Once he opens the e-mail, he checks the content, and if it's poorly written, he simply won't waste his time reading it.

Mr. Godinez also urged our class of all seniors to get to know as many reporters as we can by taking them out to lunch or out for a drink. Establishing and maintaining a personal relationship with a reporter, according to Godinez, can potentially remedy an overlooked typo or another error in an e-mail that might be cause for deletion.

You're not going to get ink every time you send out a press release. With a little patience and the ability to understand the mysterious world of the reporter, most anyone (even the fresh-outta-college-graduate) can be successful.