Here Here! You Go, Tom!

Am I going to feel like an idiot if I show up at this affair? It looms as a distinct possibility. Then again, why not simply claim my space as a been-around-the-bend elder who knows that, in the blogosphere at least, words trump technology and always will, no matter how exotic the evolution of the tech stuff.

that's right my godson! You claim your deserved place, and give David a hug for me too, because, if you can believe it, and we've talked enough to not believe it ourselves, we've never met. I hope you do go and enjoy yourself. Let us know how it turns out!

O brave and funny woman...

...whom i adore:

No I'm not going to link to the scene where Steve and the editor of PC Magazine suck and make up. Instead, maybe you want to meditate alongside me: does business have to be disgusting, to work?

----> fuckifiknow.

***

I Want One! Or, clicking thru my sponsors.

Don't they make this stuff for grownups?
No I am SERIOUS. I want to be swaddled.
Do you get it? SWADDLED!

A panel like this...

I mean, at a web2.o event, you can't touch this.

death of a talisman

when he's not busy writing joint statements, he's rebooting in what looks to be one of the most fascinating talks of the town. interested in the human condition? bootbootreboot.

runningoutoftoiletpapertoday.com

That George sent me a link to this circuits column about the High Possibilities of Web 2DotOh and I have to say, I was nearly all a flutter with excitement. The author imagined the possibilities of Web 2DotOh and thought up a website that would tell us who's sick with what so we could use good hygiene and Stay Healthy (problem being, this idea would only show which INTERNET users are sick, and everyone knows we're a sickly bunch with too little Vitamin K, but don't let that get you down):

When my kids come down with various horrible flu variations, and it gets bad enough to see a doctor, we often hear from the pediatrician: “Oh, yes, it’s going around. You’ll have vomiting for two days, and then you’ll get better.”

Well, gosh darn it, why couldn’t someone have told us? If so much is known about a certain bug, then it would help a lot — both with life planning and with managing emotions — if you knew a little bit about what was in store for you.

Somebody should come up, then, with a Web 2.0 site where people could report what they’re catching and what you can expect from it. You could see a map of your region and watch the red cloud or the blue cloud spread closer and closer to your neighborhood, the better to step up your hand washings. As you lay in bed, miserable, you’d know that at least you had only 24 hours to go. Or whatever.

The Web did what you would expect -- IT ACTED LIKE A COMMUNITY-CAMP-SOCIALNETWORK AND IT ANSWERED! OH GLORIOUS WEB! OH SO MANY PEOPLE WITH TIME ON THEIR HANDS AND AN EYE ON THEIR BANK ACCOUNTS AND OVER-THE-COUNTER SUDAFED! YES VIRGINIA, there actually IS such a site!

It is called whoissick.org. There you can track post nasal drip in YOUR TOWN! Right Now, 24x7, from any Internet browser -- cough/sore throat (as if they're the same), headaches, fever and more. You sick? ME TOO!

And I'm sure mobile is coming soon.

I can sleep tonight, let me tell you.

This got Me In the Spirit, and I sent George back some ideas of my own as I began imagining the Possibilities of the social web:

CART4YOUYOULAZSHIT.COM - A social site where grocery store shoppers enter the last location of the cart they used so geeks with PDAs can pull in and park next to the nearest empty cart that is closest to the store's entrance! Hey, CALLING WHOLE FOODS - w00t!!

EATMYGASNOW.COM - A social site where participants monitor their farts and the farts of others AGAINST where they have eaten out so that the social web can determine which eateries serve the gassiest foods! t00t!!

RUNNINGOUTOFTOILETPAPERTODAY.COM - A social site where we track how much toilet paper we use, and who is running out of toilet paper, and then perhaps we can determine who is wasteful and send trainers out to teach "new techniques" in ass wiping! Hat Tip to George for the domain! h00t!!

Apparently George is on board for site development as he sent me some of his preliminary social research:

"Your search - runningoutoftoiletpapertoday.com - did not match any documents."

Suggestions:
Make sure all words are spelled correctly.
Try different keywords.
Try more general keywords.

----

Razer Sharp on Blog Sisters

Helen Razer has been on Blog Sisters as long as I can remember. Like a lot of the posting members there--yours truly included--she doesn't post there all that often, but when she does, woooohooo it's ALWAYS wonderful and cool and day-changing. It's what blogging used to be before it was coopted by U.S.ian Web2.o zealots with few chops and even fewer clues.

Wonderful writing case-in-point -- today's Blank Paris, in which Ms. Razer explores the Meaning of Life and Love in a pixel-driven collage of absurd current day rating mechanisms--from Paris Hilton to trans fatty acids.

I give you the start here. You'll have to go read the rest.

In every life, about a handful of Truly Significant moments are collected. These, unless you’re easily given to joy upon opening stationery catalogues eating spaghetti, polishing brassware et al, are wrung from events broadly agreed to be drenched in emotion. Births, deaths, marriages and all their variants and relatives from illness to ignited love provide the stuff of big moments.

You will recognise these moments for their potency. Within these instants, some sort of emotional coin is dropped. A new mechanism is activated and, slowly then suddenly, your insides creak and you’re changed for good.

When you care to peruse your album of rare and remarkable moments, you will almost certainly find these were built in the immediate company of life, death and affection. You may also find that this record is slim. This, truly, is the way it should be. A life too well-punctuated by high drama and joy is a life drained of meaning. Unless, of course, you’re Namoi Campbell.

I suspect that I’m quite fortunate to have collected a few such moments for display and ready reference. My internal emotional directory contains a select hit list at the top of which is an “I Love You” closely followed by an “It’s completely operable”.

Occasionally, however, I find myself eager for the inclusion of new moments.
Like a brooding tween hepped up on a dissatisfying diet of Emo and trans fats, I find myself idly hoping for bad-ass, life changing emotional action.

...

What's in a Name? SEO!

In the era of search-engine-optimized names, I inherited one -- my own -- that came pre-optimized back in 1962, when there was only one Jeneane Dimino spelled my way, and again in 1986, when there became only one Jeneane Sessum, spelled my way. And back then, there was no Google.

So what's my secret? First, a 9-year-old sister who was learning that "the first vowel talks and the second vowel walks" in school (hence the "ea") when I was born, followed by a husband with Island, French, and Native American heritage that makes for an unusual-in-america (without an "s" on the end please) surname.

Sometimes luck can beat Google.

[[bonus link -- searching on my maiden name brought me to this from my 1978 high school musical chorus appearance in Godspell. And what a great musical it was!]]

...

the net begins to realize the net is just the net after all

Renee has an interesting post where she chronicles a mini-test, or not so mini really, to see just how many people in her life who are not in her online life are actually online at all. She found not many. She also lists a lot of activities that she will not move from the desktop to the ether -- email being an important one.

Now Renee makes a living, last I knew, working with Internet companies. So I found her post particularly interesting and can relate to feeling in 2007 what I did not feel in 2001, and that is: 1) too old for this medium, 2) too deep for this medium, 3) tired of this medium, 4) uninspired by this medium, albeit I am still somewhat hopeful that art and humor and joy and sorrow can rise above the unbearable noise of of tech-biz-as-usual-white-men-conferring-once-again-and all-is-right-with-the-world-god-bless-America-that-matters-amen.

I like the reality check of this post, because Renee rubs elbows with a lot of influencers who could use a dose of WTF, which she gives:

Last year, I went to a flickr party and was the oldest person in the room. I attended the event with a 27 year old girlfriend who is a lawyer in the Valley. She dragged along three lawyer friends from LA, all roughly her age and none of them had even heard of flickr.

"Everyone is using Twitter," I'm told. I don't get it and won't. It's not that I'm not open to trying something new - it doesn't solve a problem for me that is need of fixing, nor does it improve my life. Nor do I even think its cool. As for useful? Perhaps at a three or four day conference in a foreign city for all of those three or four days.

It took my immediate family six years to find my blog. And I'm not exactly low profile. So I can completely relate to Renee's take on who is NOT online the way we are online. And she mentions the specific fetish of all things web in the Valley. Ah yes, the Valley--who's writing the book on the Cult of the Valley and the Religion of Social Media? I want to help. Or at least pre-order it.

In that the reality of many, not to mention the economy of many, can be shaped by the hyperbole of a few, the Valley is a shining example of how New Religion works. It is an example of how powerful cult mind control can be. Extending its tentacles across the global Internet -- with quite literally around-the-planet reach--it's a whole new ball of wax, one the leading cult debunkers have yet to touch from what I can tell. The Valley's webcult has the potential to be a global Waco in the making. It's just waiting for its Koresh. Or maybe he's distributed this time around.

Or maybe I'm getting all worked up over nothing. Leave off the Silicon Valley element if you wish (though I don't think you should), and read Renee's take from a strictly business perspective to get a glimpse of where the rest of the world is in adopting This New Social World Order, and Renee's warning that not everybody knows what you know.

The marketer in me sees opportunity. The parent in me sees trepidation. The artist in me sees an aardvark on a cell phone. Whatever that means.

Keep in mind, Renee is also at OnHollywood, while I am only OnTheCouch, so that could account for her deep dive on the topic and my sort of abstract take.

...

y blog?

ya'll may have readers and admirers and butts in conference seats. But I have brothers and sisters.

And in other news, the hamster's awake and eating. He is currently challenging Madame's hamster for the longest life award. He is the father hamster who saw his wife eat 13 babies, the father hamster i mistakenly thought was the mother hamster and put him in the cage with the babies for an entire day, which is why they never got nourishment and when I switched parents, the mother ate them. The second round of kids went better. No one got eaten that I know of. But the father and one of the son's did get into a pretty big fight one time and the old man kicked his son's ass. This hamster's lived so long (for hamsters that is) that I don't even remember his name. I think he's the original Marshmallow who became Max when we realized he was a he and not a she. That was after the 13-hamster-baby-parent-gender-mixup snafu.

Sometimes things don't turn out like you thought.

...

knowsitall

There are so many thing I like about Tony Pierce as a blogger, person, Christian, twisted unit, writer, webworker, multi-culturalist, laist, and other things. I should have known that when he got around to group blogging, he'd find a way to do that right too.

anyways i didnt want people to think that laist was the tony pierce show because believe it or not the whole world isnt as into your pal as you think. plus it wasnt like they were discovering me naturally, they were being sent someone from mitch & murray who enjoyed drinking coffee.

long story short friday we had 17 posts by 15 different contributers.

now thats a group.

i get my titles the old fashioned way

i drink a little smoke a little and when midnight rolls around i get on the scale

then i write down my weight and write down the first title that comes to my head

this week i was so busy that i wasnt able to talk about lost or the sopranos or about how i talked to chris in africa who told me that a goat took a dump on her bag while they were IN a cab.

of all the things i teased her that would probably happen to her, that was not on my neverending list of jungle-related comedy. the lord always has the last laugh.

---

simplyacquired?

I first saw simplyhired back when they launched the site, had a brief email exchange with the folks there based on my support for the site, and thought it was both powerful and easy to use--the first and best among lots of aggregated job sites to follow.

I wrote about simplyhired a year ago, thinking that a large enterprise might snap it up or at least partner with this kind of site rather than continue to lose valuable employees from the drain of attrition THROUGH these kinds of sites. Mighta been smart. But the Web is smarter.

Simplyhired had an odd effect on my own freelance business. A year or so ago, when I was worried about enough work coming in to pay the bills, whether or not I could continue to make it sans corporate job, I'd search on simplyhired and ease my mind: there are jobs out there. That knowledge--fooling myself, reassuring myself, playing mind games with a half-loaded deck, whatever you want to call it--actually helped me hold out and stay focused on building my own business.

I'm not out of the woods on the worry front. One half day at a time. But simplyhired, in an odd way, kept me on course, for better or for worst, through it's incredible database of jobs I didn't have to take.

We learn from TechCrunch that Google may be looking to acquire simplyhired. Say that three times fast.

As Google becomes THE source of support for the global virtual enterprise of miscellaneous, loosely joined workers, the acquisition makes sense. I hope it works out for the simplynhired folks.

...

Blame the Twitterer, Not the Twitter?

"Like Rivers Cuomo on serotonin reuptake inhibitors."

"Indeed, a whole lot of early adopters hate Twitter with Ted Kaczynski intensity. Seriously, there are netizens out there that hate Twitter worse than the third season of Lost. Twitter’s attraction is easy to assess for those interested in the high of new technology and the camaraderie of nonstop contact. It’s the next logical step after the design inanity that is MySpace. But what’s with the animosity? I’m all for hating things, but a lot of these bloggers are downright nasty."

heh.

Look, you know I've had my on-again-off-again with Twitter. I respect Ev--he's one of the reasons I'm here blogging. But when it comes to how Twitter has evolved--or has failed to--I'm left stumped.

I checked in recently and was astounded to see that nothing had changed there. Pretty much the same vapid chatter that made us sign up for the Do Not Call List on our home phones.

It wasn't until I realized that I was PAYING to get twitters as Instant Messages on Cingular -- shelling $80 out of my pocket to find out that my favorite Silicon People were once again having dinner -- that Twitter jumped the shark for me. Maybe that's not surprising.

But what does surprise me is the lack of innovation among the users on Twitter. By now, any other open space -- even given character limitations -- would have birthed something new -- TwitterPoetry. Limerick Jam. Twit for Charity. Adopt-a-Twit. Something!

What I see? The same folks eating and drinking and meeting. It is a complete lack of innovation at the user level that can only be fully understood upon further examination of the service's power users, who continue to use Twitter to do the same thing they have used it to do from the start: Annoy other people.

Among the many things twitter is NOT, please count blogging. Text messaging charges will apply.

...

one more for the road: I still think Ev has a good chance of being the first start-up maker to be double-bought by google.

guitarman

Just now, George is working out on guitar--sounds great. he's getting in touch with his inner high end.

Me, I'm thinking about cleaning the hamster cage, which means I'm getting in touch with my inner hamster. Insert your own jokes.

Telling your story

Have you seen Blogger Stories yet? One of my favorite Atlantans and blogologists, Toby Bloomberg, started the site to tell the stories of how people have been touched by blogs, podcasts, vlogs and other online interactions.

Toby and her featured guests are up to 90 chapters of stories contributed by bloggers across the globe. Reading Blogger Stories is a good way to find new-to-you bloggers to add to your aggrevator. For example, My Back Pages. I've been enjoying/empathizing with Kristen's sleep probs.

Anyone notice I'm moderating comments?

I know you have. I am sorry if I don't approve your comments quickly. Also I understand if that means you decide not to comment. I'm thinking about what to do with comments as my blogging is sporadic these days. For now at least I'll moderate.

It's amazing how many racist dimwits have come out of the closet and into comments since my newfound fame of a month or so ago (ten years, five minutes--time isn't really keeping itself straight for me these days).

So, yeah, I'm moderating comments. Jerks, death threats and racist anonycowards won't get through. I don't need a court order or a code of conduct to make it so. Isn't that something.

I may be sporadic, but I'm still here.

...
...

shelley on damn interesting on Tuskegee

When people say there should be no Black History Month, I say ok, but can we have Black American Holocaust Month? No? What about never forget? Americans CRAVE to forget. We are the most forgettenist bunch of plow-ahead-without-a-tear-Protestant-work-ethic people to inhabit this magnificent orb.

To wit, Shelley looks at Damn Interesting, where Alan "Hot Pastrami" Bellows has an enlightening account of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. Just one of many reasons why Black Americans sometimes find it a wee bit difficult to 'get over it.' Hey, have you ever thought or said that yourself--about slavery, about Tuskegee, about lynchings? Ever thought it while listening to a co-worker of color on a rant about politics?

If so, have you said 'get over it' that to a Jewish co-worker with relatives killed in the Holocaust? No? Why not? If you live in America, the comparison is worth thinking about.

Shelley Quotes:

In the mid-1940s, however, the recently discovered antibiotic penicillin was determined to be a safe and effective cure for syphilis, and the US government sponsored a nationwide public health program in an effort to eradicate the disease.

The researchers at Tuskegee, in a bid to preserve the fruits of their labors, kept the cure a secret from their subjects. They also supplied local doctors with lists of the participants' names, and instructed the physicians not to provide penicillin lest they interfere with a government health study. The administrators of the experiment were not interested in saving the lives of the black farmers, they were interested only in dissecting them on an autopsy table. As one of the doctors unceremoniously stated, "We have no further interest in these patients until they die.

----

Few of the researchers who participated in the study ever admitted to any lapse in ethics, most of them insisting that they were merely following the directions of their superiors.

...

everything's coming up misc.

Excited to get a new-book-fresh-smelling copy of David Weinberger's Everything Is Miscellaneous today.

So far, I love the little yellow dot, the blurbs by heavy hitters like Esther Dyson and Chris Anderson. I love the term "information omnivores" which has summoned for me visions of bizarre half-human, half-dinosaur creatures grazing in a field lush with data. Yum!

I love David's picture on the jacket, its sparkly blueness. And -- as if you can't tell -- I haven't started reading it yet. But I'm on my way.

...

Gabriel Brings a Sledgehammer Down on DRM Issue

Smart smart smart smart. We7 is a soon-to-be-launched music download solution that makes sense for all constituents. It got Peter Gabriel's investor $ and is getting a close -- albiet paranoid -- look from the folks currently sucking distribution and marketing dollars out of artists' pockets.

The new company, based in Oxford, appears to be targeting the UK first with its advert-funding model. Using technology that the company calls "MediaGraft," We7 will dynamically insert 10 second advertisements at the beginning of songs when they are first downloaded. The advertisements will be tailored to the particular user requesting the track, and a version without ads can be downloaded one month later.

Gabriel has been involved in several innovative music startups recently, including The Filter, an automatic playlist generation program that is also free to download. He was also a backer of OD2, a "digital service provider" that has formed the foundation of many European online music stores.

Put a social network behind it and BAM you've got an end-around on MySpace. A 'lil sneak attack. Hey, you never know. I've been right before. I think once or something.

Meanwhile, blogging sucks.

Film at 11.

...

penpaperpower

been writing with a pen and paper lately. full circle come back around. I had lost what sloppy handwriting ability I had during lo these many years of blogging. I can't believe my letters. shapes that bend at my hand. They make me.

These keys: what? plastic.

You cant see what I write now, paperpen. I am unblogging myself. David Weinberger, what do you call that trick?