Radford celebrated a culture of public service Wednesday with an innovative entrepreneurial shoe guy, cake and balloons… and I used it an an excuse to test my Kodak zi8 camera and WordPress.com’s photo gallery feature. (Is it obvious that those “thumbnail” images are meant to be clicked on to get larger versions? And from there, is it a safe guess that clicking on the headline takes you back to the story? I wish they built in a “photo caption” device that would stay with the picture. Or maybe I just haven’t figured out the system yet.)
I neglected to get a picture of the cake… or eat any of it… Maybe the next time we have a centennial I’ll get in that line.
From a journalism and new-approaches-to-media angle, I found it interesting when Blake Mycoskie talked about TOMS Shoes getting its first success from a feature story in the LA Times. Then he used CraigsList to get some interns. (He didn’t mention whether he at least paid for a subscription to the LA Times to say thanks.) Then Vogue came calling. And social networking through Facebook helped spread the message.
Eventually, AT&T heard about his running the business by phone; AT&T was already his service and told his story in AT&T ads — which turned-on even more people to his buy-a-pair/give-a-pair approach to combining a for-profit business with service to poor people around the world.
mild-mannered reporter who found computers & the Web in grad school in the 1980s (Wesleyan) and '90s (UNC); taught journalism, media studies, Web production; retired to write, make music, photograph sunsets & walks in the woods.
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