{"id":1718,"date":"2008-02-28T19:40:00","date_gmt":"2008-02-28T19:40:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ashwinl.com\/ideas\/a-viral-message\/"},"modified":"2008-02-28T19:40:00","modified_gmt":"2008-02-28T19:40:00","slug":"a-viral-message","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ashwinl.com\/ideas\/a-viral-message\/","title":{"rendered":"A Viral Message"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A couple weeks ago, I attended a NASA conference in Silicon Valley at\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.nasa.gov\/centers\/ames\/home\/index.html\">Ames Research Center (ARC)<\/a>. A common theme at the conference, was how to inspire the next generation of space enthusiasts. Two young NASA employees:\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/explore.twitter.com\/skytland\">Nick Skytland<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/explore.twitter.com\/gfitz\">Garret Fitzpatrick<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0presented an engaging 15 minute Powerpoint on this topic. It was titled Generation Y Perspectives.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>The audience of mostly 100 fellow GenY&#8217;ers were told: &ldquo;This presentation has been created so that anyone who wants to can take it and use it.<\/p>\n<p>With this, I tested a theory:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>at the time (~Feb 13, 2008), I\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.google.com\/search?client=safari&amp;rls=en&amp;q=GenY+Perspectives&amp;ie=UTF-8&amp;oe=UTF-8\">Googled<\/a>\u00a0&quot;Generation Y Perspectives&rdquo; and other variations to no avail<\/li>\n<li>I searched blinkx.com for video of similar content. No related results<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I was quite aware that this was good content, and well communicated, <b>but was it on the correct medium in order to be widely distributed on the Internet?<\/b>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>For MPowered,\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.slideshare.net\/mpowered\/aiaa-mpowered-entrepreneurship-nasa-innovation-in-aerospace-competition\/\">I had worked<\/a>\u00a0with a brilliant 1-year-old start-up,\u00a0called<a href=\"http:\/\/www.techcrunch.com\/2006\/10\/04\/introducing-slideshare-power-point-youtube\/\"> Slideshare<\/a>\u00a0and decided it was the best medium.<\/p>\n<p>I shared the resulting shlideshow on Facebook, this\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/ashwinl.tumblr.com\/post\/26526139\">tumblog<\/a>, and emailed it out to some friends. As of last week, 50-odd hits. Impressive for a week, I thought. And then today, I woke up to a bucketful of emails noting that people had added this presentation to their favorites and viewed it. I was surprised to find ~1400 hits to the slideshow.<\/p>\n<p>Most hits were originating from a\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/blog.wired.com\/wiredscience\/2008\/02\/nasas-gen-y-ste.html\">WIRED\u00a0blog post<\/a>\u00a0by\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/web.mit.edu\/mars\/Conference_Archives\/SpaceVision2004\/speakers.html\">Loretta Hidalgo Whitesides<\/a>. <b>My\u00a0conclusion\u00a0from this test is that it takes 3 to tango: (1) good content, (2) a good medium for distribution and (3) good publicity.<\/b><\/p>\n<p>I do not subscribe to the thought this is &ldquo;shallow, egotistical and depressing&rdquo;, but as a space enthusiast, I do agree that this presentation only presents the problem and does not specifically address how to solve it. At the least,\u00a0Nick Skytland,\u00a0Garret Fitzpatrick\u00a0\u00a0and their friends have got the discussion started.<\/p>\n<p>Read and\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.opennasa.com\/2008\/02\/28\/gen-y-panel-at-aiaa-the-reaction\/\">participate in the discussion<\/a>\u00a0at OpenNasa.com\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A couple weeks ago, I attended a NASA conference in Silicon Valley at\u00a0Ames Research Center (ARC). A common theme at the conference, was how to inspire the next generation of space enthusiasts. Two young NASA employees:\u00a0Nick Skytland\u00a0and\u00a0Garret Fitzpatrick\u00a0\u00a0presented an engaging 15 minute Powerpoint on this topic. It was titled Generation Y Perspectives.\u00a0 The audience of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[99,100],"class_list":["post-1718","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-nasa","tag-writeup"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ashwinl.com\/ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1718","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ashwinl.com\/ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ashwinl.com\/ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ashwinl.com\/ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ashwinl.com\/ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1718"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ashwinl.com\/ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1718\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ashwinl.com\/ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1718"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ashwinl.com\/ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1718"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ashwinl.com\/ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1718"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}