OMG my face hurts (you too)
sinus infection, have drugs now, oh my face oh dear my teeth help yo.
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August 26, 2006
Scoble on why Amanda's laying low is lame and how mainstream press is no longer paying attention, and how the whole amanda thing is "sad"...
OMG How fucking obnoxious. Scoble says Amanda has blown her opportunity for attention in his post about how PopURLs aggregated something about her without linking to her.
Specifically, Scoble says Amanda has blown an opportunity to get attention from the mainstream press for whatever company she might have chosen to pimp next. I mean, what has the broad been doing--taking her time with her...oh...i dunno... real life?
Now if I were a bettin' woman, I'd bet that Scoble or VideoPod or wherever it is he works tried to get Amanda to hawk something during the highly linked Rocketboom hubub, which is about the same time that Winer and Crew came down on the side of Rocketboom, not Congdonboom.It would have also been about the same time Amanda was figuring out what to do next. And I'll bet she maybe ignored the illustrious advice from from Podiovideo or whatever it is.
CONGjecture, my friends. Pure conjecture.
Besides I don't like to bet these days. Only scratch off tickets. Ask my kid.
Amanda, take your time. Yesterday's forgotten are tomorrow's Celebs, babe.
"People are forgetting who she is. Every day she waits she loses more value — the mainstream press won’t pay attention to this story anymore, they’ve already moved on. That’s really sad. If she had announced something new within the first few days she could have really added a lot of attention to something."
From the scoble feed on YellowGatr.
Tags: Tags: amanda congdon, rocketboom, scoble, mainstream press, PR, web2.0, tech, lameness = Powered by Qumana
My 100 Million Dollar Secret
Got My 100 Million Dollar Secret by David Weinberger--gonna set out to read it some with jenna while we're sick. THAT IS if she can stop being alburterol-inspired NUTS for five minutes at a time.
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ValleySchwag, yes i get it.
Can i help loving my valley schwag? No, I can't. This month with a videoegg t-shirt (i get the men's dudes), some cool stickers, a zoom photo book maker that was way too complicated for this schwagart so I gave the photo paper to jenna to make stickers out of, a topix.net pen--ooorange--and a pin or two. Note to vendors: pins need to go bye bye. I'll take pens and t-shirts and stickers and paper--useable stuff--all day long over buttons and pins that are so small they take the dexterity and eyesight of a, well, 20-something to use. Pins are like, so over.
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August 25, 2006
Flashteroids Fun. Go Play.
Come, play games in blog posts and on myspace pages. user-generated-programs-for-users. mmmmm yummy.
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The Internet As Fruit
You STILL think there's no real thinking going on inside MySpace? Well, you try describing the Internet in fruit terms.
You see, a network is a collection of grapes. These grapes are connected to each other by string, forming string-connections, where each grape makes one string-connection with every other grape that's in its network.
The internet works the same way. It is a network, but on a global scale; therefore, it's a really large collection of string-connected grapes. However, in order for a grape in the United Sates to connect to a grape in Japan, a lot of string is required, more string than a single grape can afford.
The solution: the grape finds an orange, to string-connect with. In turn, these oranges connect to other oranges using straws, forming straw-connections. Unlike grapes, oranges have lots of money and so they have miles and miles of straw. Also, the reason oranges use straw-connections is because straw-connections are faster than string-connections.
Fuck yeah there's more.
Tags: internet, blogging, myspace, web2.0, fruit metaphors - Powered by Qumana
Incestuous Tech Conference Syndrome (ITCS)
When I was a wee lassie at the University of Buffalo, an undergrad in an advanced English program featuring some of the most respected literary figures of our time as professors, I learned a couple of things. 1) it pays to have someone type your paper for you when you own a crappy IBM selectric typewriter and your entire grade depends on that one paper. 2) Great writers don't study writing. They study everything else.
The best of my teachers and mentors told me: wrap yourself in textures of what there is, not in the exercise of writing. Writing is not for studying. Philosophy, religion, politics, ethics, world history those are subjects to study. Read everything about them, because writing is merely the act of understanding them out loud.
That got me thinking about our collective Technology, Web 2.0, blogging and social media conference fetish. What we really learning in attending this never-ending run of conferences -- more about technology, more about blogging, about journalism, about social software and social networks, more about the Internet, more about online communities.
We're drilling down, sure, but are we drilling up? Or at least sideways?
I don't think so.
What I liked about SXSW was that it was more than tech, more than blogging. It was music and film; it was about artists performing and sharing. And even that fell short of what we should be doing more of.
We need to get out of our own way, our own heads, and our own networks to be truly social.
Can we send bloggers to conferences and gatherings outside of tech, off the web, and see what that does to our writing? To the blogosphere? Can we encourage some tech and web2.0 sponsored conferences that have nothing at all to do with what we're doing? Is the best way to break into new formats and platforms, to inspire innovation, to discover what seems completely unrelated?
I think it could help move us beyond this annoyingly noisy barrage of blogspeak, at least a little bit, at least until some of us remember how to write, or at least offer new contexts for our content. I know I'm game.
Tags: blogging, technology, web2.0, conferences, sxsw, social media, Internet, writing = Powered by Qumana
burningman too?
ferget the web2.0 conferences--dragoncon and burningman are coming. weesh! Bruce Eisner says he'll be posting if he can. Two guesses from which event. ;-)
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Meebonogami
Geo-Tag-Based TV!
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Go, Denise. ;-)
Double Go, Stavros.
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With the web becoming riverized, i guess pagecount doesn't matter anyway
Our favorite inventor and bloggerfather Ev Williams has an excellent post about traffic, page views, how the old web metrix don't work re: the new web flow of conversation, etc. Because we now connect and communicate BEYOND the textual hyperlink, page views aren't what they used to be. Poor site design that boost page views by site elements loading individually, those visiting through widgets and RSS feeds--and I'll add the incredible number of referrers coming through misleading or irrelevant search engine results--these are just some of the reasons why a page view isn't a page view isn't a page view.
Ev says...
But Ajax is only part of the reason pageviews are obsolete. Another one is RSS. About half the readers of this blog do so via RSS. I can know how many subscribers I have to my feed, thanks to Feedburner. And I can know how many times my feed is downloaded, if I wanted to dig into my server logs. But I don't get to count pageviews for every view in Google Reader or Bloglines or LiveJournal or anywhere else I'm syndicated.
Another reason: Widgets. The web is becoming increasingly widgetized—little bits of functionality from one site are displayed on many others. The purveyors of a widget can track how many times their javascript of flash file is loaded elsewhere—but what does that mean? If you get a widget loaded in a sidebar of a blog without anyone paying attention to it, that's not worth anything. But if you're YouTube, and someone's watching a whole video and perhaps even an ad you're getting paid for, that's something else entirely. But is it a pageview?
Go read it all.
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Did I say that I think the YellowGatr should put some ads on its site?
I mean, rivers are expensive if not expansive. Personally, I recommend my friends from Qumana for a river of customizable blog ads.
Without a paddle.
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Okay Cool--I think I'll Subscribe to THIS version of the big dogs' feeds
I LOVE YELLOW!!!! And, How Handy! I can look Yellow Gatr: Big Dogs anywhere I am, sort of like being mobile except right now I happen to not be mobile, but you never know, and on one page I see what the leading forefathers of tech are saying, 24x7. In YELLOW! With one click, their intellect is streaming right into my browser.
Awesome! I don't have to go to their sites at all. It's like a river of content (ROC) coming right at me. Hey, that's the airport identifier for Rochester, New York, the city of my birth! Synchronicity!
The web is ever expanding. More people, more access, more content, more rivers, more bridges. More Money! We can all benefit from this aggregation of feeds -- making these can't-live-without-em sites more accessible is the job of technologists who want to empower users.
The more accessible the content, the better the Web, right? Wow! Hot Damn!
Tags: river of news, aggregation, debranding, RSS, dave winer, shelley powers = Powered by Qumana
the school bird flu
School started for us Cobb County residents on August 14th, approximately 10 days back. Two days ago--a mere week after stepping through the hallowed doors of her elementary school -- Jenna caught some variation of the bird+flu+sinusitis+tonsillitis+plague+bronchitis+mad+cow+disease. In other words, it's a motherfucker. And that's no pun, as I now seem to have been contaminated with the H3193 virus, which I hear can last up to seven years, three months.
Home schoolers, have I told you enough on this blog how much I heart you? How brave and smart I think you are? How I yearn for your guts, your courage, and your tenacity? How if only I didn't have to spin yarns for clients by day and night, and if I had more than one child who desperately demands socialization--I too would home school, not because of my philosophy or religion, but for the reason that makes the most sense to me: GERMS.
I have entered that germ-yard that is my child's school on five occasions in the last two weeks: sneak a peek, meet and greet, drop off bean bag chair for class, pick up sick kid, walk sick kid back to class after doctor.
Each time, I have been completely coated with my own child's saliva from continual hacking and respirations of nebulizer treatments past. I thought I could absorb no more crud, and yet, I found myself bathing in the germs of dozens of sweet mutants exhaling fire from their lungs. Today, Jenna announced that every kid in her class was sick. I know, I said. Because I have what all of you have. Oh. My. God. I. Feel. Like. Crap.
I think that all of the families in a given grade either need to decide to home school, or move in together full time--one big commune, so we swap everything we have DNA-wise, resulting in some sort of survival of the fittest or best insured evolution--so that there are no strange germs at school, nothing new to get sick with, but instead one giant cesspool that we all call home.
Who's in? You? You? Come on, and bring the lozenges.
Tags: bird flu, back to school, bronchitis, sinusitis, tonsillitis, pharyngitis, malariaitis = Powered by Qumana
August 23, 2006
christopher clockerb locke @ krugle
get trippy w/ RB and see his hair, growing out nicely and making him look all of 16 again. ;-)
Before the appetizers arrived, Laura and I got talking about the early web when there was basically only one browser. Sure there were Cello and Lynx, but everybody was using Mosaic, which was developed at NCSA in… “Damn, now where was it? Someplace in Illinois, I think…” As I’m hopelessly searching my fast-failing memory, the guy next to us at the bar says: Urbana-Champaign. Correct! And just like that, he’s a third party to our rambling historical review. As my erstwhile co-conspirator Doc Searls might have said: dinners are conversations.
Tags: fall out boy, christopher locke, rageboy, doc searls, david weinberger, krugle, Urbana-Champaign = Powered by Qumana
Blacks are Twice as Racist as Whites in South Africa, OR What a Dumb Fucking Poll
From Mike Y Blog? Golby, new South African nationwide research, conducted by Plus 94 Research, a marketing research company and affiliate of the Gallup group, claims that black South Africans are twice as racist as (not to be confused with "sick to death of"?) whites when "seeking out services in public places." Precisely:
"Some 44% of respondents claimed to have experienced an attitude from Africans they believed bordered on racial discrimination, against 27% who had received similar treatment by whites when seeking out services in public places."
Yeah, well, there you have it. I knew there was something about them I didn't like. They're a bunch of bloody racists. Plus 94 Research tells me so and the Sunday Times, our largest-circulation paper, spells it out. The poll results headlined this past Sunday's edition, which was avidly snapped up by countless millions who've always suspected our black brothers and sisters of having it in for us.
It goes to show. The Nats weren't so bad after all, eh?
Pity about the Indians, Muslims, coloureds and the hoi-poloi. The poll tells us they really get stick from our indigenous rednecks.
"This is something that people need to know because it’s a reality for many people when dealing with a security guard or a bank.”
Well Heck Yeah!
Tags: mike golby, south africa, Plus 94 Research, Race, Ethnicity, Discrimination = Powered by Qumana
August 22, 2006
lunchtime nap, co-worlds, and Legends
Sometimes my work takes the form of sliding back onto the pillow and letting my thoughts go crisscross up and down until I fall asleep. AKA: I take a nap. Today's noontime exercise in zzzzs produced a certain dream about a certain service that was essentially, in non-dream terms, a virtual world called LegendsDM (trademarked? try dreammarked).
In Legends, cool old bands from different time periods, as well as the products/commercials from certain eras--the designs just looked like different time periods--were streaming and alive. The dream feeling was one of being bombarded, but not in an unpleasant way, with a blast from the past.
Imagine the excitement (confusion?) for those product placement people in old media scrambling to get old Coca-Cola bottles or old beer -- Schaefer is the one beer to have when you're having more than one -- commercials running in Legends in context with the bands from the same time period performing, all with links out to today's versions.
In the jumpy-dream way I experienced Legends, I noticed different compartments/portals/areas--what are these worlds inside of other worlds called--co-worlds?--where it felt like the Brady Bunch era, and another where a band was playing looking like Duran Duran, but that must be because I read an article recently saying Duran Duran was going to play live inside Second Life.
Maybe some remnant of that article, combined with jenna's 50's sock hop dance from Friday, are what streamed all of these nostalgic co-worlds into my head, under the brand name of Legends, while I slept instead of doing what I was supposed to do, or maybe visiting Legends is exactly what I was supposed be doing.
Tags: co-worlds, coworld, legends, music, virtual world, games, web2.0, tech = Powered by Qumana
so who said "small is the new big?" (and better yet: why?)
We all know that Jeff Jarvis says that he said "small is the new big" a day before Seth Godin said it (6/6/2005) and then made it a book with weird cupie-doll figures on it. Seth says, hey it was a coincidence--better yet, synchronicity. Wanna buy a book?
BUT WAIT! The phrase dates back even earlier. Would not real journalists check such things? Pshaw! It's the dawn of new media. New is the new old!
Says wikipedia, the phrase dates back at least to 2001 when Big is the New Small supplanted Small is the new Big in playing off the costliness of small electronics in the 90s.
We all know you can't trust Wikipedia though. I mean. Especially. Where. Important. Matters. Are. Concerned.
But what of this small is really big notion? Are there other instances of not just coining a phrase, but putting the content of it into context?
Oh my! Wouldn't you know it? In a strike of synchronicity, the Boston Globe used "Small is the New Big" in March of 2005 -- more than a YEAR before the Jarvis-Godin epiphany! in an article about Sarah Susanka, who, in 1998 developed the Not So Big House concept, which tackles the how-tos of putting spacious-feeling abodes into small spaces.
I wonder who reads the Boston Globe. Not suggesting anything. I'm just thinking out loud. Maybe suggesting. After all, this is new media. Suggesting is the new fact checking.
Alex Beam's rant about all of this x is the new y shite, entitled Nonsense is the New Sense, is good. Oh yes it is, and at first I wondered if Jarvis or Godin had read it.... but then I remembered, who needs old articles when you've got new media?
;-)
Tags: Seth Godin, Jeff Jarvis, Small is the New Big, The Not So Big House, Boston Globe, Tech, Web2.0, Wikipedia = Powered by Qumana
August 21, 2006
No Problem!
My n key is fixed! What you have to do, for the record, is turn the laptop on it's head--or it's back--in other words pretend the screen is the keyboard, and THEN you can use gravity to pull the little keyholder prongs out, and THEN you get it all aligned, and THEN you push until you either break the keyboard or the key snaps sort of into place. And THEN you type again. RB IMing from Krugle central gave me the tip to clean under the key. I figured out how to break it all on my own.
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busiess opp
keyboard assistat wated - every time i eed to type a "N" i IM, you will type it for me. 24x7 coectivity a must. fluet i web 2.0 ad cosoats.
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oh o!
The key came off (okay i pulled it off tryig to clea out crumbs) of my "N" (pressig the loose rubber stopper there) of my acer laptop. I cat get it back o!! What do i do? It has this little lippy thig that seems to have correstpodig doohickys o the uderbelly of the plastic key, but they dot lock i.
aaah!
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Robert Scoble Going In for Skin Thickening Treatments...
Scoble Plays the Nigeria Card
Scoble Says "Ad Hominem Card" Instead of "Reverse-Race Card" on Nigerian President's Son
Scoble Perseverates Over Argumentum Ad Hominem Infinitum
Scoble Incites Dozens to Defend Microsoft's Stupid Live Spaces
Oh, Ken says it better--I'm done writing headlines for this.
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in the news on business blogging...
Atlanta biz bloggers score one for the home team in Business Weeks' small business column, where Toby Bloomberg and yours truly, along with Teresa Valdez Klein of Blog Business Summit, share our thinking on about internal blogs.
"TALKING SPACE." However, because blogs are bottom-up in nature, they sometimes require a change in thinking about employee communications, says Jeneane Sessum, a social media consultant based in Atlanta. The traditional top-down communication approach, where the CEO or HR manager pushes policies and procedures out to employees, can be subverted by an internal blog, which is communal by nature.
An employee [[should be "internal blog can"]] blog will serve more as a "...centralized talking space for company news and views, customer wins, etc.," Sessum explains. "Blogs put the nexus of control, at least from a communication standpoint, in the hands of employees, thereby empowering them. At the same time, because internal blogs remain within the firewall, they are a good venue for honest communication and collaboration in a relatively safe environment for businesses that are just getting used to the idea of blogging and may view it as sort of renegade."
Since I only half know what I'm talking about at any one time, I point you to Toby, my Atlanta blog buddy.
Bloomberg adds a word of caution: "Although it's not a top-down strategy, unless management and the company culture support this type of informal communication it is set to fail before the first word is posted. It's critical that the company provide training and encouragement, especially in the beginning stages."
"The lines of communication between departments can be difficult to maneuver. Blogs can be a means to easily share information that might not be perceived as relevant to one department, but critical to another. An added benefit is that informal team-building occurs naturally. There is ongoing personal communication, so people begin to know and understand folks from areas of the company they might not have had a lot of contact with."
Tags: BusinessWeek Online, Business Blogging, Blogs, Corporate Blogging, Tech, Web2.0, Toby Bloomberg, Teresa Valdez Klein = Powered by Qumana
August 20, 2006
I'm Sorry Sir, Sammy Davis, Jr. is the Only Black Man We Own.
I knew a man Bojangles
Always danced with worn out shoes
The silver hair, a ragged shirt
And bare ragged paints
The old soft shoe
He jumps so high
He jumps so high and
Then he lightly touches down
i met him in a New orleans cafè
He was down and out.
My first take on myheritige.com (family 2.0 site) was: Hey, this is fun. You can see I played in the posts below -- the celebrity matches of me and scoble.
George was working on his computer, four feet away, and he had just lost an email he was writing that was FULL of important information--ARRGH I know that frustration, and before sleep, I showed George my celebrity matchup collage. We laughed--he said, I think it works by focusing in on certain parts of the face and then matching a part to each celebrity. I think that's about right. I said, now let me see how it does with you, and uploaded a photo of George.
I met him in a cell in New Orleans, I was
so down and out.
He looked at me to be the eyes of age,
as he spoke right out.
He talked of life, he talked of life. He laughed, clicked heels instead.
You have GOT to be kidding me. First, even though I selected MALE, it couldn't deliver more than 6 men, and the only black man they could come up with was Sammy Davis Junior? I tried it two more times to be sure.
Mister Bojangles
Mister Bojangles
Mister Bojangles,
dance!
Never mind that I don't see a black face on the myheritage.com site. I understand from a business perspective. LOTS of white people I know are obsessd about genealogy, searching for that missing relative who will link them with a king, a queen, or a celebrity. But imagine what a tool billed as "The most powerful genealogy search engine on the planet" could do if it were to tackle the REAL genealogy challenges of the black Americans whose relatives missed the Ellis Island Experience. Or at least recognize variations in skin tone as part of its matching algorithms.
From the Faces of the world's 4,000 most famous men and women, this is it?
He danced for those at minstrel shows and county fairs
throughout the South.
He spoke with tears of fifteen years how his dog and he
traveled about.
His dog up and died, dog up and died, after twentyyears he still grieved.
Maybe that'll be what Family 3.0 is about. In the mean time, don't be too concerned. The technology isn't completely lame on the layers of humanness around ethnicity: George Sessum, meet your long lost cousin, Joi Ito. Your two photos actually share a resemblance. Maybe there's a connection.
I'm adding on to this post, because I'm sleepy and I shouldn't be writing at 6 in the morning without sleep, because as I think in a broader context, I'm wondering is it the skin COLOR thing that's bothering me, which actually it isn't, because of course we're all mixed (sorry my white supremicist brothers), or is the stupidest part that Sammy Davis, Jr. is the closest match they can deliver, probably BECAUSE of his skin color, even though the two look NOTHING alike, not even in the pix. I mean a couple of the other photos look more like George...... Oh hell. They do NOT. None of them work. No, I'm standing by my ire. 4,000 of the world's most famous people, and you give me Sammy? Naw. Nope. Not okay.
He said, I dance now at every chance in honky tonks
for drinks and tips.
But most of the time I spend behind these county bars.
He said, I drink a bit.
He shook his head and as he shook his head I heard someone ask, please
Mister Bojangles
Mister Bojangles
Mister Bojangles,
dance!
Tags: my heritage, race, ethnicity, america, slavery, genealogy, joi ito, george sessum, kissing cousins, web2.0, tech, photo recognition = .
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a case for kiko cash
i'd bid up kiko on ebay, buy it for twice the $50K, and consider the $100K a PR / crisis management expense, well spent to squelch fears that web 2.0 is having, errr, issues. Use the product as an internal tool, stick it into your widget set, whatever. It's a nice little feature-tool. good logo. nice branding. sweet domain. You've spent money on worse things.
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