Driving Mr. Daisy

Jeff Jarvis has a post crying "foul" against those "playing the race card" in the now-appended NYC Transit Strike. (Disclosure: my deck didn't come with the race card--I was obviously ripped off!)

I admire the way Jeff Jarvis can reduce hundreds of years of American history into a curt post admonishing those with the audacity to bring up issues around the role of race and class in the political wrangling during the strike. Jeff says not fair. I say dogmatism is so much easier. Santa: In my stocking, please?

Jarvis writes:

Now I almost understand, or at least not be surprised at, Sharpton and Roger Toussaint grasping at cheap shots try to spin this illegal strike, this act of unlawful thuggery against the people of New York. Toussaint is also playing the race card as he tries to summon the ghost of Rosa Parks onto MTA buses.

Well that's all wrapped up in a neat little journaljistic package, isn't it? It's that simple. Not fair for for Sharpton or Toussaint to raise the issue. They should put their cards back in those decks from whence they came and instead oogle the talking heads I have the misfortune to be watching just now on Fox News, chuckling their obnoxious mouths off over the imminent death of unions because of this latest NYC distraction from America as usual.

But here's the thing about Internet Journaljism: There's always someone who says it better and smarter than you. Take Tom Matrullo, in his post, Mass Transit Looses Its Johnson, referring to this fella. Read Tom's entire post.

Rather than reducing the matter, Tom does what he usually does: leaves us to continue the story within ourselves, our contexts, to make meaning.

This is the difference between the journaljist, whose intent is to report stories tied up with neat Christmas bows for you to pack away with the ornaments and remember who sent them, and the journalist who is masterful at inspiring further thought.

It is the difference between talk radio and Coltrane.

That Johnson, a highly regarded writer about things current and intelligent (like the brain), could offer such a reductive view of the reality of New York labor is instructive. (In an earlier post he complains that there's no easy way to click on the web and find all the traffic cams along a certain route. The realm of slovenly atoms clearly has failed to live up to certain suddenly normalized expectations of ease aroused by our instaworld of clicks and codes.)

It's probably not by accident that Brooklyn is the first place the aliens erupt in Spielberg's War of the Worlds. When one thinks of transit workers in New York, one thinks of people of "other" ethnic persuasions working underground. As far as anyone knows, they live there, breed there, die there. Except when they're on strike.

I wondered if Tom or Jeff had run into this article in Mass Transit News by Sara Kugler, which seems to play, uh, the reverse race card, with trademarked Fox News terms like Looting(TM), Rioting(TM), Fire(TM) - as in setting stuff on - and Bloomberg's newest: Thugish(TM).

If anyone came out looking good in New York's three-day transit strike, it was the city itself.

No one looted, rioted or set anything on fire. Transit workers who crossed picket lines before the strike ended Thursday were not attacked, although they were subjected to scorn by millions of stranded commuters who normally rely on the buses and subways of nation's largest public transportation system.

None of the workers or union members "looted," "rioted," "attacked," or "set anything on fire." But commuters "scorned."

Yes, Jeff. It's all that simple.

gonna let it go unless you have a good idea...

My "journaljism.com" domain expires in February.

There's potential.

Discuss amongst yourselves.

Well, well, well....

Just when you thought it was safe to turn grandma loose on the Internet...







He's Baaaaaaack!!!

oh boy and how.

...

half-n-half

I was thinking today that I've spent half of my 20 years in the workplace within traditional companies, and half with startups.

I've spent 6 living the agency life, 12 on the corporate side, and 2 solo.

The truth is, I don't know any agency types who have never worked on the corporate side. That's a good thing. I'm not sure you can operate within a professional services environment without having fought the good fight on the corporate side. Hint: If you're working with a PR firm, make sure the people on your team have walked in your shoes, at least for a little while.

I also had a one-year partnership (I put that in with the 6 agency years above) and startup adventure last year, which is a long story, and one I prefer to tell over drinks and not in the Blogger window. Some things are like that.

During my years on the corporate side at Kodak and then Systems Techniques (bought on up the food chain all the way to IBM), I was always frustrated that things weren't moving fast enough, that not enough people were putting in 100 percent, that deadlines were far too long, and in fact, I'm sort of ashamed to admit, I used to say: "We could finish ANY project in one day if we just stayed here overnight and did it."

Yes, I expected the people in my group to stay over. I was there too, but still. Was that really me? Did I really live that life? That was all before the Internet became my workplace. It seems like it could have been 30 years ago.

How many overnights have I spent at the office in my jobs at Kodak, at STI, at Ketchum. I had a blanket and bedroom slippers under my desk for six months once. And I used them. Our developers had pillows under theirs at STI. And they used them.

That was when work was as much a family as a workplace.

It was also before I was a mom, and that's not coincidental.

I am so thankful the connections and collaboration made possible by the Internet, because that is what's allowed me to stay home with my daughter for the last 8 years, to be a mom who doesn't have to sleep over at the office or take weeks-long business trips. I still pull an all nighter at least once a week, but I'm here to make breakfast when it's done, to put half-and-half in my coffee and to take her to school when she gets up, and I'm here when the bus comes home.

I am blessed to be living in this time. Call it Web 1.0, call it Web 2.oh!, call it whatever. My life would look so different without the net that I'm not sure I'd recognize myself. The last 8 years would have been impossible. My kid's life, already, even at 8, would have been completely different if I couldn't do what I do here.

And when you stop and think about that fact being replicated across mom after mom after mom after mom, it's a pretty amazing thing. Maybe even worthy of a ".0"

...

Shhhh don't tell anyone... OKAY TELL EVERYONE

Chris just unzipped his lip about .zip files and BubbleShare .

Officially this feature doesn’t exist and the secret loophole may close at some point soon! So shhhh…don’t tell anyone.

You can always count on me to keep my mouth shut. ;-)

In other news, good news about carrying over comments too:

If you upload photos that have comments embedded within them (ie. using Picasa or Photoshop) then the description tag will become your caption.

...

I MADE SHELLEY SAY A FOUR-LETTER WORD!

HA! I got her to say it! I got her to say that nasty slangy word she hates: "BLOG."

That's going into my bio in a long list of Web 2.OH! accomplishments.

OH! YES!

Okay, but HOW do you tag?

I have to start tagging. Technorati tags at a minimum. So, do other blogging tools make it easier to tag, or do you have to copy and paste and size your tags into every post? Does Blogger not make tagging simple because Google stands to lose through tagging? If everyone tags, what does that do to traditional web search? Does it go back to being a world-static-web instead of world-live-web thang?

These are questions.

The only thing I understand for sure is that I have to start tagging, because when other people are tagging you, you should probably be tagging yourself.

Kind of like editing your own Wikipedia bios--OH WAIT. That's a no-no!

;-)

Gum Gum Gimme Some

*******AND NOW A WORD FROM OUR SPONSOR*******

In the event you've formed an ElimiTaste habit like our favorite crime fighter, please note that CEO Matt Willer's offering a HO HO HO of a deal--a 2-fer-one on Zapp and SmokeScreen from now through Christmas Day.

****BACK TO REGULAR DRAMA, POETRY,
AND INFIGHTING ABOUT WEB 2.Oh.*****

Building Bridges

One thing about Web 1.0: I didn't mind that my personal stash of content -- data, images, video, sounds, writing, what have you -- was spread all about the net. You know me: The poster child for early adoption. When Flickr was a random experience of chat+images on steroids, I was in love. Orkut? there. Linked in? there. Friendster? there. Blogger? there. Wordpress? there.

In essence, I'm a little bit everywhere, and a lot some places.

As a result, whether we call this Web 2.0 or not, pieces of me, of things I've previously created, are scattered in places I can't even remember. In some places, like on blogspot, I have what Doc calls a legacy. Similar to Doc's 5,300 photos on Flickr (Doc, we're all coming swimming this summer), I have 3,000 posts on blogspot. I've wanted an easy way to get them out and turn them into other things since 2002.

In the words of the illustrious RageBoy: Been There; Still There.

That's the thing about being able to get out what you put in.

And in land of 'vice-versa,' Doc has a great idea for a universal uploader that would make it easy to upload batch content -- in this case photos -- to wherever and whatever service you want.

So then, it's the issue of portability, my desire to take my little suitcase (okay big one) full of content -- and if you hate that word, you're not the only one, so we can call it stuff if you like -- and unpack it in various spots online.

Maybe we stay for a while and leave. Maybe we build a legacy there. Whether to build a home for us, or a vacation spot, or an flea-bitten hotel--that's up to those who develop the software, services and platforms we come to love, or come to leave -- or come to and go from as we please.

And what about building bridges between these places? Like Doc's universal uploader -- we need content movers, like those airport people movers, the ones that carry your load without you having to drag it along a step at a time.

The longer we're here, the larger our legacies. It would be nice to be able to shuffle them around while we're still around to shuffle.

...

T-Mini

The technorati-mini is kewl.

Web 2.0-athon

Stowe Boyd is conducting a poll on his blog that asks readers whether or not we should drop the term Web 2.0 from our conversational lexicon. Stowe used Quimble to create and share the poll -- that's fodder for another post entirely.

It's Thursday at 9:27 a.m., and the nos are leading the yeses 26 to 17.

We live exciting lives in these days of Web 2.0.

But you already know that. What I think I know is that there are several reasons why the Nos are ahead on Stowe's poll, not the least of which is that his readers are Web 2.0-friendly--maybe passionate is a better word. Another likely reason: Anyone doing anything on the net right now for profit does benefit (in the short-term at least) from the Web 2.0 moniker. It is a category to position brands around; it is a hook for competitive differentiation; it is an entire industry to invest in, and best of all it ushers in an entire new opportunity for cool schwag .

This is a new thing, this naming of an era as we rush headlong into it. "Dot-com" picked up its moniker somewhere in the middle of its lifecycle, when we used it to distinguish young quirky startups with company names that were URLs first, often beginning with "e," blessed by venture capitalists or at least angel investors, from the rest of us.

Do you remember the first meeting you were in when the youngest kid in the room said, "Everyone's dropping the 'e' now. We don't need the 'e' anymore."

I do.

Next, we broke the term down further, using "dot-com" to distinguish between businesses with no realworld infrastructures and those with physical infrastructures and real-world trappings (bricks and mortar), like HR departments. Soon after, HR became the most stressful job in the company, which fed the staffing industry boom as these new dot-commodities gave away new cars to get talented techies onboard. And soon after that, bricks-and-mortar companies began to differentiate themselves from one another by adding ecommerce capabilities (or at least building good websites) and doting over customers. They became "bricks-n-clicks."

My point is that every step of the way along that yellow brick road, we met -- as Dave Winer says -- carpetbagger marketing types looking to make money. Hell, most of us WERE them.

At the same time, the road was there and it was yellow. Which means it's not an either/or, black-or-white thing. You can drop the name, or we can watch it evolve as smart marketeers find points of differentiation within and outside of the Web 2.0 category to position and grow brands around and woo investment in.

It's a scenario replicating itself in thousands of different spaces at once - as with Blogging now, where Blogs as communication tool are being incorporated into social software solutions, along with other new media phenoms, like podcasting, videocasting, WIKIs, and so on.

Remember the debates about what blogging was or wasn't? Should we call it blogging or is it simply publishing? Is it the medium or is it the message? Is it journal or is it journalism?

To this day you won't see Shelley using the word "blog." It's "weblog." She took a semantic stand, God bless her.

Sooner, not later, though, individuals and businesses (which are becoming increasingly the same thing -- another characteristic of whatever we call this time period) will begin positioning and differentiating around Web 2.0 and its sub-categories, and what are little tiny insignificant spaces today will burgeon into billion-dollar industries. Forget sooner or later. Look at recent history. Look at photo sharing and Flickr. Flickr was an application that did all kinds of weird things growing out of the MMPOG space, then it became a service, then it became a category (photo sharing), and when you combine it with all of the pieces that go along with digital photography, badaboom you have an industry.

The interesting thing to veteran marketing folk is that it used to take hundreds of thousands, often millions, of marketing dollars and a year of work to create a category within an existing industry and position a given company as a leader, preferably 'the' leader. We advised clients against the approach. In fact, it was more cost-effective and and faster to pick an existing category and differentiate against either a week competitor, or a competitive weakness in the category leader.

Now entire industries take shape seemingly overnight.

It is, in a word, incredible.

What's more incredible is that the meeting I sat in with the first kid who said, "we can drop the 'e' now," was only six years ago.

All of this is a long way of saying Web 2.0 will take care of itself. There is no 'grand meeting' of minds or strategies on the net where we gather around a conference table and agree on messaging and positioning, on dropping the 'e' or not.

Leave it be. Position within it, or position outside of it (this is what Dave is doing). And either way, you might be right in the end.

There is no consensus, because you can't have the net and consensus.

...

The 12 Days of Blogmas--Err... Christmas

On the first day of christmas
my true love gave to me
a new tag on technorati

On the second day of Christmas,
My true love gave to me,
Two saugeen strippers
And a new tag on technorati

On the third day of Christmas,
My true love gave to me,
Three google ads,
Two saugeen strippers
And a new tag on technorati

On the fourth day of Christmas,
My true love gave to me,
Four photo uploads
Three google ads
Two saugeen strippers
And a new tag on technorati

On the fifth day of Christmas,
My true love gave to me,
Five Scoble Links!
Four photo uploads
Three google ads
Two saugeen strippers
And a new tag on technorati

On the sixth day of Christmas,
My true love gave to me,
Six bloggers blogging,
Five Scoble Links!
Four photo uploads
Three google ads
Two saugeen strippers
And a new tag on technorati

On the seventh day of Christmas,
My true love gave to me,
Seven passwords passing,
Six bloggers blogging,
Five Scoble Links!
Four photo uploads
Three google ads
Two saugeen strippers
And a new tag on technorati

On the eighth day of Christmas,
My true love gave to me,
Eight pods-a-casting
Seven passwords passing,
Six bloggers blogging,
Five Scoble Links!
Four photo uploads
Three google ads
Two saugeen strippers
And a new tag on technorati

On the ninth day of Christmas,
My true love gave to me,
Nine feeds-a-feeding,
Eight pods-a-casting
Seven passwords passing,
Six bloggers blogging,
Five Scoble Links!
Four photo uploads
Three google ads
Two saugeen strippers
And a new tag on technorati

On the tenth day of Christmas,
My true love gave to me,
Ten Lockes-a-leaping,
Nine feeds-a-feeding,
Eight pods-a-casting
Seven passwords passing,
Six bloggers blogging,
Five Scoble Links!
Four photo uploads
Three google ads
Two saugeen strippers
And a new tag on technorati

On the eleventh day of Christmas,
My true love gave to me,
Eleven Winers wining,
Ten Lockes-a-leaping,
Nine feeds-a-feeding,
Eight pods-a-casting
Seven passwords passing,
Six bloggers blogging,
Five Scoble Links!
Four photo uploads
Three google ads
Two saugeen strippers
And a new tag on technorati

On the twelvth day of Christmas,
My true love gave to me,
Twelve Sifrys sifting,
Eleven Winers wining,
Ten Lockes-a-leaping,
Nine feeds-a-feeding,
Eight pods-a-casting
Seven passwords passing,
Six bloggers blogging,
Five Scoble Links!
Four photo uploads
Three google ads
Two saugeen strippers
And a new tag on technorati

...

If you haven't seen Shelley's Year in Pictures...

Then you really haven't seen anything yet.

Shelley on Sock Puppets and Wikipedia

in a wikipedia deletion debate cum how-it-all-works or w-t-f article that should not be missed.

It is intent to deceive or to dabble in malicious mischief that sets a sock puppeteer apart from a legitimate user with multiple accounts. Sockpuppet accounts are either created deliberately in order to vote multiple times, or to setup “straw man sock puppets” in order to provide weak counter-arguments.

Wait til you get to the meatpuppets!

I'm off to the attic to get my pet.com sock puppet and play along.

My New Years' Resolution to Become an Open Soar

I'm going to start a practitioner blog, practition seven days a week, go to the proctologist once a month, and practice what I preach thrice daily, so I can make the list next year as a practitioner.

Was glad to see the Cluetrain guys getting the nod or lifetime achievement award or whatever appropriate golden trophy they deserve. How about a virtual mount rushmore? mount cluetrain?

Today I'd also like to announce the Jeneane Sessum Top 3 Open Media Relations Client List:

At ElimiTaste Gum, Matt Willer has a new blog up, aptly named mygumjob.com (yah, think about that name). Please welcome Matt to the blogosphere and add him to your blogrolls, unless you are of a web 2.0-ey mind that blogrolls are web 1.0, which they aren't.

But I digress. Matt's the CEO of a GREAT company that makes a sinus-clearing gum called Zapp (buy it online!) and a smokers-breath soution (ask RB) called SmokeScreen. I've labeled their category Indie Gum because they are to the BigGum industry what independent artists are to the Musick industry.

In 06 we will embark on a campaign in which we call ElimiTaste the Open Gum pioneer so they can make a top-x list and as a bonus hit the radar of any online dentist who might recommend the sugar-free gum to their patients who chew gum for healthy gums.

Of course, the FINE FINE folks at BubbleShare have been blogging for a while now on the BS site, and their CEO, brainiac Albert Lai is blogging over at Simply Albert. Let's give Albert a round of applause and another bio protein bar!

Doc gave BS a try today, but I have an email into him explaining that BS does not require Flash 8 except for batch uploading -- mostly BS relies on Ajax, including the cool new zoom slider. I guess I'd also add that I work with BubbleShare as a consultant. Slim difference, but not so slim for my other clients...

...One of whom is an older-school industry giant who's out there blogging, slowly, but we're not quite ready to talk about that yet...

So I've been busy around here too, with lists of my own as you can see.

And now, for a spur of the moment poem...

seven at seventeen
wonder when they'll come
the one who touches me
there
and there,
and the one
whose touch died
when butterfly wings were still magic,
the crunch of sneaker soles on straw
and sweet scent of manure
escaping time
raced ahead of me
greets me now
at 43 on the road
resting an elbow on the driver-side door
speedometer reads 73
the highway open,
near any farm
any pasture
and any warm wind.

There is no other me.

...

BubbleShare - "Best Photo Sharing Service Yet?" Yep.

Michael Arrington calls BubbleShare "rediculously easy to use."

Things are album based. The free service allows users to create albums of up to 100 photos each, with a permanent URL for sharing. Photos can be dragged and dropped to change the order, resized and a voice comment can be added. Comments are available for visitors as well as an RSS feed.

AND try BS's newest feature, an industry-first Ajax-based slider that lets you dynamically zoom and reorganize photos on the fly. Weee!

The first blogger who posts a bubbleshare album on their blog and leaves me a comment here gets a $10 amazon gift certificate from me. (just because I want to see who's been naughty and who's been nice.)

And I mean it.

ho ho ho...

The one thing about Kodak is...

...that the culture there is so prehistoric that this tradeshow gimmick would seem like a really "hip," "risky-cool," "grassroots," "guerilla" approach to them. For all the wrong reasons. The other thing about Kodak is that it is still so big and clumsy that often the left hand doesn't know when the right foot is stepping in doo doo.

It's nothing new, as shocking as it may seem that such an old, conservative brand decided to go all sexy sexy. Or sexist. Trade shows are ripe with women-on-display, to smile and bend and bring in the booth traffic. That's the name of the game. Kodak's never been an exception there.

Now, ladies, here's a tip for you--assuming they let you keep the underwear: go home and put it on ebay as an advertising collectible. Give me the link and I'll pimp it for you. Consider it extra compensation for those heels they made you wear!

no one knows how to mock themselves the way ad agencies do...

GREAT holiday video, or lack thereof, but more, behind the scenes even, from Closerlook.

"It's brainstorming! Come on, work with me people!"

A+.

Don't miss the song at the end. It's downloadable here -- you don't often hear holiday songs with "optimize your ROI" in them. ;-)

How I Use The Net Part 1 - sometimes i get stuck on a little thing...

and i have way too much fun with it. All by myself.

oh and tender crisp bacon chedar ranch.

oh and Tom Kills Oprah is good.

web 2.0, no

the best post on the web 2.0 'is it or isn't it' topic i saw lately, which I can't find, says: This isn't Web 2.o, it's Cluetrain 1999.

Amen.