penske FTW. so far, anyway.
After posting yesterday about choosing to rent a Penske truck over a u-haul for my move next week, I was happy to see that I had a visitor to the site from a penske domain today. I hope that means somebody in their company is actually engaged in proactive customer service on the web (or at least has a google alert set up for Penske). It’s like companies that have a CSR on Twitter. You have to like that. Nobody visited my site from u-haul, even though I’ve mentioned them a few times in the last few weeks. Already I’m feeling better about my decision. Hopefully Penske comes through next week.
a word about twitter
I’ve been spending a lot of effort lately trying to explain Twitter and/or justify my enjoyment of Twitter to people. And while it’s hard to explain “microblogging” to people who don’t quite grasp the purpose of blogging to begin with, let me just say this about Twitter:
Tonight, while I’ve been sitting here studying for next weekend’s Finance final (zzz…), I’ve been tracking the progress of 1) the NBA Finals Game 5, 2) the Tonys, and 3) the US Open (major putt by Tiger Woods no doubt) via my friends on Twitter (one of whom is actually at the Tonys). Being able to watch 3 major events, in real time, while being 100% focused on a textbook, has been pretty sweet.
And while I’m sure this doesn’t help any of those naysayers out there… this is another one of the things I find fascinatingly useful about Twitter.
Reporting Russert
It is a sad day for television, journalism, politics, and frankly, the whole country. Tim Russert died this afternoon of a heart attack at NBC’s Washington Bureau. He was 58.
We became aware of the rumors about his death internally at ABC News around 3pm. It was almost 45 minutes later before Tom Brokaw interrupted NBC and MSNBC to report the death. By then several news outlets, including the New York Times and the New York Post were reporting it. There is a gentleman’s agreement between the television networks to defer to the shop affected before reporting news about the competition. When NBC finally went on the air, so did we, updating our site, etc. The same deference was given when our own Peter Jennings passed.
On the web, it was interesting to watch Twitter and Wikipedia through this ordeal. When we first heard rumors of the news, Twitter had only a few recent tweets about Tim Russert. Within 20 minutes there were a few dozen, and by the time I got back to my desk, after NBC had confirmed the news, it was in the thousands. Wikipedia had already been updated with his date of death before the rumors had even reached ABC’s newsroom.
Thoughts and prayers to the Russert family and Tim’s colleagues at NBC.
