Mediaboss Marketing

Rep. Lisa Brown (D-West Bloomfield)

LANSING (WWJ) - The Speaker of the Houses office is defending the decision to reprimanded a state lawmaker whosaid vagina during adiscussion on the House floor.

Rep. Lisa Brown, a Democrat, was told by House Republican leaders she could not participate in debate Thursday because she used the word vagina during a discussion about abortion legislation the day before.

Her words on the House floor Wednesday were: And, finally, Mr. Speaker Im flattered that youre all so interested in my vagina, but no means no.

WWJ Lansing Bureau Chief Tim Skubick spoke with Ari Adler, press secretary for House Speaker James Bolger.

Was the use of the v-word the problem for Ms. Brown? Skubick asked.

It was the context in which it was used and the way it was used, that was the problem, said Adler.

Adler said the situation will be resolved when the chamber resumes after asummer break.

In an interview Thursday with Skubick, Brown defended her comments.

I used an anatomically correct word. I said vagina. Is there something wrong with that? Can I not say elbow? I dont see what the difference is, she said.

Excerpt from:
Office Defends Censorship: ‘Context’ Was Problem With Rep’s Use Of ‘V-Word’

LOS ANGELES--(BUSINESS WIRE)--

Nearly two years since mall owner Capri Urban Investors announced its intentions to completely overhaul Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza, the $35 million upgrade is complete. The comprehensive makeover, which includes the addition of new state-of-the-art movie theaters, several restaurants and retailers, a new outdoor plaza and cosmetic improvements, has transformed BHCP into a top-tier shopping center in the heart of the Crenshaw community.

We made a commitment to raise the bar at Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza two years ago, to ensure we are providing the amenities, services and quality experiences consumers have come to expect at best-in-class facilities across the country, said Ken Lombard, partner and president of Capri Urban Investors, LLC, the owner of the mall. We now have a gleaming new center and a line-up of quality retailers that this community deserves, and we look forward to announcing even more new restaurants and stores in the months ahead.

Since the renovation began, several new retailers have opened their doors at Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza including Staples, which now occupies a brand new building adjacent to the mall. BHCP is also now home to the all-new Rave Cinemas 15, a modern multiplex featuring stadium seating, all-digital projection and seven RealD 3-D equipped auditoriums. It is the first Rave theater in California with Rave Extreme: the Big Screen Experience, which includes giant wall-to-wall, ceiling-to-floor screens, enhanced sound systems and digital projects. The theater has been wildly successful since opening in July 2011, often grossing among the top 100 theaters in the nation for family films.

The internationally acclaimed Debbie Allen Dance Academy, which moved from Culver City into a brand new building at the corner of Marlton and Santa Rosalia Avenues in 2009, continues to draw hundreds of young artists from across Southern California to Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza each day.

The mall now boasts several new dining options as well. In January 2012, well-known restaurateur Brad Johnson and Chef Govind Armstrong introduced restaurant Post & Beam to the local community. Featuring open-hearth cooking, seasonal ingredients, and herbs and vegetables from the restaurants own garden, Post & Beam is a unique sit-down restaurant in the neighborhood. The Los Angeles Times praised the new restaurant, calling Post and Beam a promising newcomer to the LA dining scene, serving real food, California in spirit with a sassy Southern accent.

Other new dining options at Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza include Sbarro, Saffron Indian Cuisine, and Southern Girl Desserts, operated by co-owners Catarah Hampshire and Shoneji Robinson, who were recently featured on Season 6 of the Food Networks Cupcake Wars. In 2011, the first Buffalo Wild Wings in the City of Los Angeles opened its doors at Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza.

We saw this as a great opportunity to grow with the community and be part of the transformation at Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza, said Hampshire. We appreciated that the mall ownership believed in our company and the vision we have. BHCP really goes above and beyond to support its tenants and we recognize that we will have a great support team to assist in our success.

The comprehensive upgrades have sparked investment from the malls anchors as well. Macys completed a multi-million dollar upgrade that included physical improvements to the store and the addition of new departments, fixtures and merchandise. Walmart is also undertaking significant renovations to enhance the shopping experience, adding features customers have long-requested including groceries, crafts and fabrics, and an expanded apparel selection.

Between the new Rave Cinemas 15 and the upgraded mall is a new 30,000-square-foot promenade that also serves as the featured new entry point for the retail center. The promenade features lush landscaping including dozens of mature trees, Bougainvillea and Japanese Boxwood plants, new lighting, as well as built-in seating areas. Project architects Omniplan and RAW International designed the new theatre and promenade to create a signature gathering area and entry point for the entire property.

Originally posted here:
$35 Million Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza Makeover Complete

I recently gave a presentation on Internet Marketing and Social Media to a group of local professionals. Now, that in itself isnt something unusual, but something that happened during the presentation was. Towards the end of the presentation, somebody raised their hand and asked what a blog was. I had to take a step back, because many times people will not speak up when they dont understand something. It was a great reminder that technology, the Internet and Social Media may not be new to some people, but others are just getting their feet wet.

So to members of our blog audience who may be unfamiliar with some of the items that have been written about here, I decided it was a good time to pull together a quick list of items that we have referenced a number of times but have never truly defined.

Alt Text, or alternative text This is a reference to text that is assigned to a particular image on your website. This is done on the backend. You would want images on your website to have alt text for a few reasons. One, it gives search engines an idea of what the image is about (they are getting better at recognizing images, but they are not all the way there yet). Two, some people turn images off within their browsers to make their Internet experience go faster. By having alt text on an image, these visitors will see the text you choose to describe the image. It could be as basic as a friendly face, or as important as a promotion that you use an image to explain. And three, for the visually impaired who have the content of your website read to them, the reading program will read the image alt text to help describe what the web page is all about.

Backlink The term backlink refers to links on other websites that point back to yours. They can come from directories, industry websites, local business websites, chambers or any other site out there. Search engines recognize links from high quality, related websites as a factor in determining how well your website should rank on SERPs.

Blog You could go to Wikipedia and read there extremely long explanation of what a blog is, or you could read a few, like ours, and see for yourself. Basically businesses use blogs to communicate with their customers on the Internet on a regular basis. Information on the company, a product, the brand and the industry can all be shared, with text, videos, images or links to other web pages.

Content Management System, or CMS When we speak of a CMS, we are referring to a web CMS. These are applications that allow website managers to create and manage the content, and sometimes the design, or their website. Many are easier for non techies to use, allowing them to create and upload content by themselves.

Cookie Tiny pieces of data sent from a website to a visitors browser. This enables the website to remember that the visitor has been to the site before, along with other bits of information, depending on the cookie. It can remember a user name for a site, keep products in an online shopping cart or even remembering user preferences.

Keyword Rankings Keywords or keyword phrases are terms used to describe the words that a person may type into a search engine to find something. For any particular business, there are keywords that their target audience would type in when looking for their product or service. When someone types in these phrases, a business would want to show up near the top of a SERP because that is where the most clicks through to websites happen. Where a particular website ranks for a keyword is called the Keyword Ranking (i.e., If I am a shoe website, and someone types in Air Jordans, I would want my website to come up in the first placement, with a keyword ranking of #1. But maybe I am a new site, and I am on the bottom of page 2. In that case, my keyword ranking may be #20.).

Long Tail Keywords, or just long tail When people reference long tail keywords they are typically referring to phrases that have at least 3 words in them. They tend to be narrowly focused, and more in line with what the searcher is truly looking for. Many times they may not be as popular as the most commonly typed in phrases, but are typically easier to gain good keyword rankings for.

Mobile website Most websites are initially built for a big screen, either a desktop or a laptop. However, as more and more people are browsing the Internet with their SmartPhones, websites that look good on a monitor arent always looking their best on a smaller phone. When this happens, web developers build a Mobile Website, which is a version of a website that looks good and performs well on a SmartPhone.

Read more here:
Digital Marketing Terms – The Basics

SELECTIVE CENSORSHIP- Study finds criticism is accepted well but any suggestion of collective action is a no-no

WHEN Barack Obama visited China in 2009, the American leader made it a point to publicly declare himself "a big supporter of non-censorship" and said that criticism made him a better president.

"I think that the more freely information flows, the stronger the society becomes, because then citizens of countries around the world can hold their own governments accountable," he said. "They can begin to think for themselves."

Implicit in his remarks was the assumption that Chinese censors try to stamp out criticisms of the government and Communist Party.

Well, a new study by Harvard University casts doubt on that supposition. The study, which investigated "the most extensive effort to selectively censor human expression ever implemented", declares that the purpose of the Chinese censorship programme "is not to suppress criticism of the state or the party".

Censorship of social media in China, it turns out, is by no means a blunt instrument. Instead, it is finely tuned, with censors across the country allowing critical viewpoints of the government and of government officials.

"Posts with negative, even vitriolic, criticism of the state, its leaders and its policies are not more likely to be censored," the study, led by Professor Gary King of Harvard's department of government, concluded.

"Negative posts do not accidentally slip through a leaky or imperfect system. The evidence indicates that the censors have no intention of stopping them."

Even more surprisingly, the study concludes that the Chinese government is pretty evenhanded when it censors the Internet, deleting "views that are both supportive and critical of the state".

The primary goal of censorship, it turns out, is to restrict "the spread of information that may lead to collective action", even action that is not directed against the government or, indeed, is not overtly political.

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Beijing works the Internet to its advantage

A looming land grab for internet governance by the United Nations' International Telecommunications Union (ITU) could spell a drastic change for governments and internet service providers alike.

However, misguided or not, the union's motivations are far from a desire to annex the internet, observers say.

Representatives from 193 nations will convene in Dubai this December to redefine the scope of the ITU's International Telecommunications Regulations (ITR) treaty, a set of principles governing global telecommunications interconnects and cost structures last re-negotiated in 1988.

The treaty currently covers operational, regulatory, economic and legal concerns in telecommunications, including things as banal as the 'accounting principals' behind interconnection fees.

But the ITU intends to update the treaty to account for the biggest single change since its negotiation: the global spread of the internet.

The regulations, primarily aimed at traditional voice networks, were developed well before the advent of Skype, and before VoIP as a technology began eating into the core voice revenue stream telcos traditionally relied upon.

According to iiNet's chief technology officer. John Lindsay, new delivery models have given the "old world" of government-owned telcos an impetus to fight back.

"The ITU would love to make the messy unregulated world of VoIP and online content go away," Lindsay told iTnews.

Though seen by countries and some ISPs as an attempt by the ITU to 'fix' the problem, Lindsay said it is also the one the union initially created.

"The ITU can be thanked for sky-high global roaming charges, high international voice terminating access prices, and codifying the Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing plan," he said.

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Censorship vs economics in battle for internet control