Broadcasting, interpersonal communication, and the job hunt

I think at least once a week, I come across some kind of communication phenomenon that I would like to scientifically investigate. My moment for this week came early when I saw an announcement on ABC2 offering viewers with resume help. The program allows people to e-mail their resumes to Good Morning Maryland and each week, three people will tape a 20-second video pitch as to why they should be considered for a job.

This made me wonder: It seems that successful resumes (the ones that don't automatically end up in the circular file) are often tailored to the specific organization and even the specific job. So how can the people making these 20-second videos balance this need for specificity with the fact that their pitches are being broadcast and could potentially reach a large number of potential employers? I'd love to study which resumes/videos are the most successful at landing people jobs.

C-SPAN Library is here!

C-Span has put its video archives online. C-SpanVideo.org contains over 160,000 hours of footage and spans the last 23 years. Best part--it's free!

According to a New York Times piece, MSNBC Host Rachel Maddow compared accessing the archive to "being able to Google political history using the ‘I Feel Lucky’ button every time" and Ed Morrissey, a senior correspondent for the Hot Air blog said, "The geek in me wants to find an excuse to start digging." I couldn't agree more! This a treasure trove for anyone interested in political communication.

Who in the world is using what technology?

Ever want to know what the broadband penetration is in Iran or how what percentage of Brazil's population has access to a mobile signal?

Check out this website created by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a United Nations agency.

Select a county using the map or the pull down menu in the middle of the website and you can learn about telecommunications technology and technology policy in that particular country.

(Just in case you were wondering - less than one out of every 100 inhabitants of Iran has broadband and 90.64% of Brazil's population is covered by a mobile signal.)

Oscar doesn't matter that much?

According to a piece in this morning's USA Today, The Hurt Locker's best picture win doesn't mean a big financial boost. In fact, after working in marketing costs and movie theaters' cut from the box office revenues, author David Lieberman projects that the film will "be marginally profitable at best." Also, according to Rutgers Business School's S. Abraham Ravid, "The publicity from being nominated for an Oscar is 'more valuable financially than actually winning,'" and "'Award winners do not increase revenues' for the films in which they star."

So what does this mean for advertisers? Maybe it isn't so important for a product or a brand to tie itself to an Oscar winner; being connected with one of the nominees in future projects might just be enough. It looks like Oscar buzz has quite a bit of staying power...

Don't want to miss that hot new new journal article?

If you are a big fan of keeping up with the latest scholarly publications in the field like I am (or even if you just have an assignment due on a particular topic and you don't want to miss anything), you can stay connected by setting up an alert in any EBSCO database and have those articles delivered right to your desktop.

How it works: If you are in Communication and Mass Media Complete (or any EBSCO database) just log on at the top where it says "Sing In to My EBSCOhost." Next create and try out your search and then save it by clicking on the "Search History/Alerts" tab under the search box. Next, check the box next to the search you want to save and click on "Save Searches/Alerts" just above. Then you will be shown a form and in the last question, make sure you save the search as an alert. Now you will be given the option to have the article links emailed to you or they can be delivered via an RSS feed. I personally like having the RSS feed on my iGoogle page because it forces me to look at the updates daily.

So give it a try for yourself and you might just find that you never miss that really great new article again.