Back in 1971, when I was 24, my life was a terrifying blur of goats and window-pane acid. I had just moved to the Catskills to grow organic kohlrabi and rutabagas, and I was just becoming aware of sheetrock. Crazed hippies lived all around me and we had orgies up in the back forty. No electricity. We pumped water from the stream, had propane lights, and cooked on a wood stove. Nobody had the faintest fucking clue what I was thinking and I liked it like that.
May 24, 2008
punks exposed
Tag Poetry: OR All of the post labels I've used so far.
HEY HIRE ME I'M MENOPAUSAL!
God love the interwebs because what 8 years ago now or 7 anyway I ran into Halley online and years tick by and never mind all the things that have transpired in our lives in the meanwhile, I've lost count, but I was talking to her a few weeks ago and somehow I mentioned that I thought something was amiss with me. Confusion has been the number one symptom of the last month or so, or really having no brain at all; complete and utter confusion with daily tasks; I mean multiple times each day walking into rooms only to feel a jolt of electric in my temples when I try to remember WHY oh why I had left the room I was in before. Telling my daughter and husband the same thing over and over without recall. "YOU JUST SAID THAT MOM!"
Yeah that stuff happens to everyone.
But it doesn't happen to me.
Not six times in one day!!!
Until now.
And so I'm telling Halley maybe I have a brain tumor or need to find a new breed of psychotropic medication or something, and she does that Halley thing with that laugh: "OH DUH HELLO! It's Menopause. Have you NOT READ about it?"
I was like, Menopaaaaa.....?
Like a ton of brick the truth hits you.
And so I read about the forgetfulness and confusion and women showing up at their doctor's offices at my age wondering about dementia and brain tumors.
And I even cried, because I am telling you ladies who are working for a living - working for yourselves for a living using your BRAIN to work for a living -- and you're all 'OOO this conference and that conference and OOOO i think i'll work on my book now.. and Oooo what a great post..." GET THE FUCK READY FOR Menopause - it's gonna bite your ass but good.
Holy disruption to the central mental circuitry.
Now I get why women used to have kids early and not work out of the home -- by the time they'd get to menopause their kids would be out of the house and their husbands half deaf: time for a nap.
SO I've just started reading up on it, and apparently the early menopausal symptoms are the ones that completely mess with your brain and electric circuitry, so I guess that's what I'm in.
It's hard for me to tell because the OBGYN surgeries I've had have taken away any semblence of a cycle. But I'm turning 46, I ache, I have no brain, I sleep weird - like mostly not at night - I have to run after words that used to sit on the tip of my tongue, and I cry when I read books, and yell when I don't read books.
I forgot what I was going to do next, but I'm pretty sure if I go walk into a room something will come to me.
Look forward to more of my menopausal meanderings - oh I'm sure you already are - right here on allied.
Whoever you are.
---
It's getting toward june
i go back to meg's sometimes to leave a comment for her.
she opted out of life two years ago, i like to drop by.
i like to see who else came to copy code and say hello.
i like to see their messages to meg.
i wish if we said the right thing, we could bring her back.
--
May 23, 2008
Perhaps You Should Examine Your Colon!
How many times in the last 7 years have we been through the women-free TOP LISTS OF BLOGGING. Or the penis-only MOST IMPORTANT CONFERENCE IN TECHNOLOGY events?
How many men (and women!) have come before these idiots to say -- "Whoops! Sloppy reporting - I didn't realize I had all men in my aggregator - what boring shmuck I am."
The reason I'm bothering to even point to this article is because it's The Fucking Industry Standard (which I thought died during web 1.0 -- must have been resuscitated into beta form--look mom i died and went to beta) and it's an article SPECIFICALLY dedicated to finding the TOP NON-A-LIST blogs worth reading. 25 of them to be exact.
And not one of them a woman's blog.
I can think of at least 20 instances like this in my short memory. The boys at The Industry STANDARD might have happened upon some of these if they didn't take the lazy way out or decide to stay put in the typical circle jerk of links feeding the echo chamber.
My own unfucking of Stowe Boyd comes to mind. O'Reilly, not a renowned women's advocate in his own right, even published a list of important articles by and about women in tech to help educate the doofus brigade.
There's Shelley on progress - and no woman in blogging has taken more grief for raising this issue than Shelley; and there's her pointer to Karl on speaker diversity and why it matters.
(It's all related @richi, trust me).
And there's always the lazy way to get some legs on your aggregator, boys. Just go look at the hundreds of women-penned tech+ blogs listed on Blogher. Don't like Tech? There are other categories. Whatdoyaknow!
breathe in with me now....
aaaah the fresh scent of stupid.
Somewhere, some time ago, I remember reading a post -- whose was it, I forget? -- where a woman said: It is Not My Job to do your job, you sloppy reporter, and find some diversity that might make your next Top X List or Conference a bit more interesting.
That's how I feel. Just do your job.
But before I go unwrap the duct tape from around my head, let me address a couple of the commenters over at TIS (that's what we called it before it died and went to beta).
Now besides the author @Richi's lame response: "Hey I don't discriminate and I don't Reverse Discriminate either--LOOKIE ME!" (okay I'm summarizing), old JohnMc had a great addition to the conversation:
"jeneane, In a world of opportunity, crank up a blog and give it your best shot. Competition and voices is what keeps the soup hot.".
.
.
REALLY John?
WOW what an IDEA!
Starting my own blog is such a good idea I thought of it back in 2001!
Oh. My. God. The Twitolution will most certainly be televised.
But the thing that really irked me was the comment from the person who was probably trying to be nice--hard to tell. Eric Hill said: "Perhaps one should consider a "Top 25 up-and-coming female bloggers" report. Just a thought."
Actually Eric, no.
No that's not quite it.
NO that's pretty much not quite the point at all.
Nice idea on it's own, but perhaps someone should consider a "Top 25 up-and-coming gardening blogs." That's not what we're talking about here.
WE ARE NOT UP AND COMING
WE ARE HERE
WE WERE HERE BEFORE YOU
WE ARE STILL HERE
Oh lord.
Stop me.
Really, you have to stop me now.
love you all.
well, not exactly "all."
goodnight.
May 20, 2008
CALLING PORTLAND BLOGGERS WHO URINATE!
And yes, as certain as I am that gas will reach $5.00 a gallon by Labor Day, you can rest assured that Flush of the Year will be coming to your town soon.
(Um, btw you don't have to wait for the contest to add your favorite place to piss. You can add a toilet anytime online. And when you're on the go, go to mizpee.com on your cell phone to find the nearest clean restroom OPEN at the time of your query (kuz mizpee does location- and time-based search). Yeah, it's pretty cool.)
--
May 18, 2008
May 16, 2008
May 15, 2008
Link Bait or Just Really Stupid - The Industry Standard (BETA) on 25 Must-Read, Non-A-List Blogs...
experts, coders, entrepreneurs, observers, VCs... Ah so many important roles that require heavy lifting.
Niiiicccee.
Tweets for comment went unanswered today. Film at 11. (Or probably not.)
--
May 13, 2008
May 12, 2008
One more word on the Open PR Discussion...
Whatever the kingdom; it's time for the surfs (or, surfettes) to take the keys.
--
Micro Broadcast is Still Broadcast, and Public Relations Can't Scale Down
[[I'm resisting the urge to go back to the days of Adam and Eve and make everyone now admit that bloggers aren't journalists, don't WANT to BE journalists, but that some journalists do indeed blog. For the sake of time: never mind.]]
Instead, let me meander for a bit instead.
I think using twitter for PR communication and calling that MicroPR is a very Not-Good idea. Twitter is another medium, another format, but summarizing a pitch into 140 characters and 'pitching' it via twitter with a hashmark is still broadcasting. Call it MicroBroadcasting and slap its picture next to oxymoron in the dictionary, or call it MicroPR, but I can't see how that's going to change anything. Something isn't melding when I hear Stowe say on one hand "TwitPitch is the Future," and on the other hand that everything has to change.
The 'everything has to change part' is the right part. As Stowe says:
Personally, I feel that it is the whole system that is wrong, and piecemeal solutions like blacklists and filtering, and one:one agreements about how I, some specific blogger, should be approached by some specific firm won't work in the long run -- these are all stop gaps and band-aids.
The root cause here is the delusion on the part of the clients that this sort of PR carpet bombing works, that mass media messages embedded in a press release or press release-ish email work, and that we, the bloggers, actually react positively to this junk.
Right on. But Twitter won't change it.
The web 2.0 economy, the Techmeme and Techcrunch economy, will not look kindly on real change, because real change would change the power structure. Again, that is fodder for its own post as too few people realize how news is announced and 'made' in the tech sphere these days. Few understand how completely we've replicated the old school with new names. Get Me On Techmeme = Get Me LOTS of Ink; Get Me On TechCrunch = Get Me The New York Times. Old boss, new boss. Mr. Sir. Yessir. Where did we go wrong?
That is not to say PR-as-we-know-it is totally useless.
Old school Public Relations for public companies that must meet strict regulatory requirements still works the way it always has. It's not going away. It doesn't need to. The crisis management specialists, the old school media relations specialists, the IR people--they still have a role to serve in the world of public company PR. Those same people have little use for bloggers unless it is as part of a cute marketing program designed to generate some "buzz." So let's leave that galaxy alone for a while. They'll follow along in time, but only if everything else changes first.
What needs to change FIRST is PR for everyone else.
In relating some of what is changing, Stowe points to an interesting but off-the-mark idea here. although I can see how it could EVOLVE into something useful, right now, this seems to be the kind of carpet bombing approach that Stowe talks about on the other side. The PR Spammers list, started by Gina Trapani, of Lifehacker, based on Matt Haughey's post here, is essentially a wikiblacklist of PR "spammers," and it's growing by leaps and bounds. Throw some logos on there and you've got the next New Media / Social Media conference speakers list ready to go. The thing is, lots of good PR agencies and folks are on that list, including some of those I do and did work with, and that sucks. Not to mention, the list will lose its initial zing when every agency makes sure their competitors show up on that list. It just isn't going to work the way it's intended to.
I'm waiting for the REVERSE of Gina's list -- one that lists BLOGGERS who WANT information and fodder so that they can write posts that people will read and click on their ads and make them money. Because, hey, you're not out there doing altruistic work for the common good here Blogger Folks.
My ReverseGina list would have Gina and Matt list their areas of interest and preferred method of communication specified BY THEM (hint: stowe likes twitter), something that can be dynamically updated, like a wiki version of Profnet and Media Map combined, but populated by the people who will be receiving communications. This kind of tool will match the things I as a blogger am interested in knowing about -- my areas of interest -- with what companies want to talk about, and then match and deliver those wants up in a non-intrusive, timely way. WITHOUT charging $5000 a month for it.
If wishes were horses...
Tools and Twitter Pitches aside, how many times do we have to say what everyone knows: relationships trump tools.
The best thing we as PR people can do is to NOT try to force news, but instead help nurture relationships between clients and customers, to make champions out of users, to encourage our clients to underwrite, support, sponsor, reward, and lift up those who might touch their product or service. TO BE INVISIBLE.
New PR should have very little to do with pitching "news" to bloggers or landing on "techmeme." It should have everything to do making it easier/better/more fun for people to tell each other their stories.
More on these important matters of business later, but right now I have to start the day after Mother's day by being a mom first.
-------
May 10, 2008
It's a good thing I've been 'out of pocket' the last two days...
And then it blows up.
I've written about that exact thing before here. And probably a dozen times before that. Some thoughts worth repeating:
I've been on both the shit receiving end AND on the shit throwing end of the PR machine myself. That's because I walk that blurry line, being both a "journalist" listed IN media map, and a PR flack USER of media map (and similar tools) where the journos and the PR flacks intersect (wish i could say connect--but that doesn't happen there).But the longer I watch the twitter culture blip blip blip in blog posts and tweets with holier-than-thou 'Oh Someone Bothered Me And Kept Me From My Important Work' emissions, the more I fume. That's why I'm glad there's pro like my colleague Brian who can address this issue both with humility and skill.
Anyone having done any kind of media relations knows the reddening sting of a pissed off reporter saying, "You haven't read me, have you?" or "I already wrote about that," or "You're just blindly pitching." And yes, sometimes they're right. But they also fail to take ANY responsibility for how they end up in the endless loop of breaking-news tag.
They know that media map and other tools give PR people infinite details on their every bowel movement. So, if they prefer to be called, if their publication doesn't REALLY cover what media map says it wants to cover, if their beat is wrong, or if they just plain hate PR people and want them to know, then USE THESE TOOLS TO SAY SO. Don't be lazy on the front end and blame the folks who give you fodder for your stories on the backend.
Just like some BigPR SVPs who think they can pull a strategy out of their back pocket to 'build your brand' without understanding your customers, some journalists pull the "blame it on PR flacks" card because it's fast, easy and acceptable to do so. Rather than spell out (and update frequently) on their sites or blogs or in their publications (or God forbid in the tools they know PR people are stuck using) just how they want to interact with us, it's easier to shoot the proxy-messenger. All because an editor is bugged by some pain in the ass emails (news flash: we all get them), hasn't had a good night's sleep, or just plain needs to get laid.
The whole PR industry being broken is not news.
As Brian so passionately explains, there are several types of emails (used to be faxes, soon will be tweets) PR people send to blogger contacts, from actual spam to some thing we don't know what to call -- Brian thinks maybe Tofu -- where the PR person is contacting someone who is publicly noted as someone with x, y, z parameters (what they write about, where they live, their specified mode of contact--usually listed on their blog), and so: SHOCK - PR people contact them.
Enter the back channel. Those bloggers (as specified above--and I'm on the sending and receiving end as I blog AND work in PR and marketing) who are now getting lots of pitches on everything from the latest thigh reducers to stories they might actually care about.
These bloggers tend to do one of three things with the emails:
1) Ignore or Delete the email.
2) Respond to the email either positively or negatively.
3) Call in the cavalry to gripe about getting the email in a heroic effort to save the blogosphere from more unwanted email and protect their own precious time and overflowing inbox , all while making an example out of the flack.
Read those three general reactions above and you'll see why the PR person rarely 'wins.' And know too, that I have had EACH of those three reactions myself.
I'm not happy with those being the only reactions available. The only REAL solutions as I see are that we PR people:
1) GET OFF OUR ASSES and create the kind of tools I've been talking about for years -- open source opt-in wiki versions of what bacons/media map are to mainstream media. An online exchange, hub, whateveryouwanttocall it - TOFUPEDIA, or MEDIAPEDIA - that lets WE THE RECIPIENTS and WE THE SENDERS of these communications (emails and tweets and whatever comes next) tell each other what we want to know about, what we don't want to know about, and how we want to find out about it. PR 2.0 needs to go OPEN SOURCE. And after that's baked, top it with RSS and call it dinner.
2) STOP PITCHING AND BITCHING altogether and assume a new role - that of matchmaker between client and the customers they serve, where we serve more a hybrid CRM / business development role than a news-making, ink-producing role (although the news-making and ink-producing are byproducts of doing the CRM/BizDev well). We BECOME the matchmakers, one customer at a time, act as catalyst and then get out of the way. We are no longer pitching news, we are forging partnerships.
Stowe thinks Twitter and other micro-streams are the way to change PR. I am not so optimistic. Changing from Fax machines to email didn't change PR. Neither will changing from email to Twitter. What changes PR is that the BUSINESS OF PR has to change - everything from the tools we use to how we are measured and compensated.
Business' expectations of PR has to change too -- especially in Tech and Web 2.0. As long as 'hitting techmeme' is the goal by which success is judged, then baby, we-all-in-deep-doo-doo.
I've been craving the kind of solutions I mention, and I try assume the matchmaking role whenever I can with clients, although I DO MESS UP. And if I can screw up, your next screw up is right around the corner.
Quite honestly, the longer it takes for PR 2.0 tools to replace the top-down Bacons, Media Map, and Vocuses of the world, the more public floggings will take place at the hand of those who are well-meaning, over-spammed, or just plain arrogant.
---
Pr pr 20 pr2.0 brian solis public relations media2.0 media 2.0 social media guru expert social media 2.0 conversations conversational blogger blog press relations relationship marketing publicity communications marcom blogger relations sorry bacn tofu spam email, marketing, advertising, PR
May 07, 2008
May 06, 2008
I'll See Your Chickens and Raise You a Great Whore
The NYT reports on Texas preacher Hagee, who would make no friend of the Pope I'll tell you, what with the Pontiff at the head of the Great Whore, which, in Hagee's view, has done little more than spill Jewish blood, from the Crusades to the Holocaust. Tit for Tat I always say.
Mr. Hagee, it’s true, did not blame the American government for concocting AIDS. But he did say that God created Hurricane Katrina to punish New Orleans for its sins, particularly a scheduled 'homosexual parade there on the Monday that Katrina came.'If God's grave wasn't empty, he'd be turning over in it.
---
Oh I know, Let's Blame India: Bush Does New Math
“There are 350 million people in India who are classified as middle class. That’s bigger than America. Their middle class is larger than our entire population,” observed Mr Bush. ‘‘And when you start getting wealth, you start demanding better nutrition and better food. And so demand is high, and that causes the price to go up.”
Yes, according to Dingleberry-in-Chief, the fact that a box of Triscuits at Kroger now costs nearly $4.00 has nothing to do with the U.S.'s Trillions of dollars in deficit (courtesy of an unwinable war). Nor is it related to the falling value of the U.S. dollar that will soon be cheaper to use for wiping purposes than the toilet paper it buys.
The problem, as Bush sees it, is that India has a lot of people who aren't poor.
Gone out of his mind? Heh. That Bush. He has all the answers.M.A. Nagvi, the vice president of the largest opposition force, the Bharatiya Janata Party, says President Bush is shifting from his earlier role of global "bomb inspector" to world "bread inspector."
West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, a key national Communist leader, says the American president "has gone out of his mind."
---
April 30, 2008
Euphemism Day
Q: What do you call a black presidential candidate with the most votes, delegates and primaries won?
A: Obama, the uppity nigger!
What a disgrace our politics have become.
Fifth Beatle Chocolate, Cluetrain, and Twitter
I scored the chocolate as part of RageBoy's social outreach (AKA email) which drew Rick out from hiding, and my big mouth into a dare whereby Rick would owe me if I could deliver a live body to his Boulder, Co address to deliver a message that used "RageBoy" and "Twitter" in the same sentence.
Michael O'Connor Clarke got involved on Twitter, pulling in Suw Charman of the chocolate and vodka blog (smelling a conspiracy theory are we?), who twittered a friend into going the one block from his house to Rick's chocolatey business and uttering the secret sentence. Rick obliged with a box for the messenger and a box for me, which arrived today via fed ex, complete with little freezer pack.
One more good deed signed, sealed, and delivered across the Interwebs.
Don't that just beat all?
--
del.icio.us tags: chocolate, cluetrain, chocolatier than what, rick levine, business, advertising, marketing, CRM, VNP, Suw Charman, Twitter, MichaelOCC, marketing, boulder, yard leaving, bon bon, highbrow, an odd fancy high











