Listics

Cultural crisis… google print… both sides are getting stupider and stupider…  speaking in our own voice is more fun and more productive than speaking through memos…  management and the tiered pyramid are close to synonymous…  largest projects in history (e.g. the Internet) were not hierarchically organized…

"What I worry about" by David W.
("mainly right now about my laptop."  he dropped it.)

a.  we’ve blown ourselves apart with the net.  How are we going to reconnect?
ii.  Social sw allows us to localize which could make us provincial and dumb… the world isn’t flat, it’s lumpy…
3.  Are we now forming a "new boys network."

David dreamed that the SSA meeting here was going to be a terrible "office meeting" but when he got here it was a rehearsal for a dance recital.  He has drawn some lessons from this dream…

David characterizes his vision as utopian, shaded by a dystopian prediction…

Conversation assumes some commonality and then it iterates on differences.

There’s an uneven distribution between lurkers and talkers.  Also jerkers and stalkers, but David didn’t say that.

Read the rest of this entry »

Kaliya Hamlin and Mary Ruddy are here at the SSA.  Great joy to meet each one of them.  This is the benefit of face-to-face gatherings.  You can meet people who are genuine and deep and good at what they do.  I’ve paired Mary and Kaliya in this post because they are both into "identity."

I met a great handful of others for the first time as well, everybody from Ann Geller to a woman named Regina whose last name I didn’t get.  Regina is heavy into Indo identity politics, and she had a presentation with her that she shared.  I suggested she connect with Global Voices people!  I met Jon Turow and deserted him… left him standing there taking in Regina’s presentation while I went to search for another drink.  I met Deborah Finn, the cyber-yenta…. Deborah and I had crossed paths online recently.  Deborah introduced me to another woman who has all kinds of vowels and an I and L or to in her name.  I am going to be embarassed when I discover who this person is.  Right now I am suffering from some combination of social aphasia and social dyslexia and the names aren’t coming like they shoudl (<– illustrative typo–).

I met Veronica, from TechRepublic and BNET… Veronica and Jon need to hook up since BNet needs writers who know finance.  I just put this together and will mention it tomorrow to each of them.

I met Liz Lawley face-to-face for the first time, and Jon Garfunkel.  And Halley’s son Jackson.  And Hylton Jolliffe.  And Vin Crosbie.

Chris Nolan was there and wonderful and gracious and funny.  Charlie Nesson was there. 

"Namedrops keep falling from my head…"

JD Lassica (didn’t remember meeting me in Nashville, but why should he.)   David Weinberger - funny and charming (Ann Geller’s husband).   Stowe Boyd.  Halley.

And the Degas exhibit was wonderful.  I snagged pictures of "The Little Dancer Age 14" among other things.

Early in the evening somebody was worried that this was another male biased conference demographically speaking.  As the night went on, it seemed to me that were a lot of women there.  Also, there are at least three I was hoping to see who I understand won’t be representing… Susan Mernit, Judith Meskill, and Danah Boyd.  They were invited though.

Ethnic diversity is another matter… the headcounts for non-whites at tonight’s gathering were horribly under-representing… I’ll do a scan tomorrow just to have something to gripe about.

This is actually shaping up to be a very interesting get together.

Jeneane hooked some of us with Eurekster about the same time I saw some marketing people demo it in a particularly unclued and all-’merican bidness kind of way.  Basically, the demo showed how to point people to what you wanted them to think and a subtext of the demo was they would never have to think for themselves or leave your site again.

AKMA, Jeneane, RB and undoubtedly others have implemented this little tool in a way that proves that when marketing is outlawed only outlaws will be straining for bullshit similes like this one… but bottom line, AKMA has this implemented right.  Go look in his sidebar column… Hot Searches!

On Tuesday Corante hosts a Symposium on Social Architecture.  The excitement begins Monday evening with a tour of the Degas exhibit.  After that, who knows?

"Social architecture," something about bees and anthills perhaps, although I know little about entomology.  We expect wasps to be there of course, and short, middle-aged striving academic careerists, as well as tall and venturesome representatives of the eleemosynary elite.  I’m hoping to meet Zephyr Teachout face-to-face and to add her photograph to my collection of "the Babes of Berkman."

In truth, I seem to always be walking a few paces off the sidewalk at these events, but I’m a writer and I seem to be finally getting the hang of voicing a contrarian opinion without turning it into a self-righteous rant.

I’m perhaps more interested in IP v.6 than I am in YASN, and if Leah or Alex would comp me, I’d be in Reston in December even if I had to crawl.  The social software scene seems to have reached the involutional level of depressing double speak with the introduction of tools like Eurekster… a tagging program that allows you to spin your own sense of what’s what and to keep visitors spiraling inward on your site with never another outbound link to trouble you with loss of sticky eyeballs.  It’s where web 2.0 does battle with web 1.0 and loses. 

But for all the resistance I’m feeling tonight, I’m really looking forward to getting my mind around what the people who will be presenting have to offer.  And I’m looking forward to writing about it.

More seriously, because neither Brian nor Belinda actually know me and hence might take my charming and witty affectations in the prior post to be the sick demented ramblings that they actually are… well, here is a little equal time for Belinda (who, I still maintain, could benefit from writing in a blog, daily):

Belinda writes:

I very much appreciate the write up on "Who is Belinda Young, PR?"  As Brian may have mentioned, I am the Belinda Young behind LiftPort and MetaInfo, as well as a number of other technology and non-technology companies, including the Seattle Home Show, the nation’s oldest and largest consumer home products showcase.  I am not, however, Belinda Young the runner and winner in the Cornbread 5 K (although I do enjoy partaking of cornbread now and then).

Your thoughts on the impact of blogs are very well articulated, as indeed is your entire website/blog.  Technology is moving so fast and changing the way we communicate so quickly that marketing and PR folks really need to be open and able to adjust to those changes.  When I started my own PR practice 10 years ago (after serving as PR Manager at Aldus Corporation/Adobe Systems), the Internet was just becoming available to the public and consumers.  The availability the Internet and email have dramatically changed my business, and certainly have enabled me to more effectively conduct my business on behalf of my clients.   For example, PR people like myself are now able to
use online subscription services to maintain media lists, editorial calendars and such.  In the "old days," this information was available in print format only, requiring data entry, etc.  Plus, since the media contacts publications were typically published on an annual basis, data became out of date rather quickly.  The online subscription services keep the information much more current.

My question:  How do I - Frank the Blogger - get in that database so PR people will start buying me sandwiches, and sharing little thermoses of garbanzo beans and such?

have one last kiss and then forget
the boulevard of jello.

Jello?  Sometimes I just lose track of where we’re at. 

Earlier this week I had an interesting exchange with Brian Dunbar (the IT systems guy at LiftPort) and Belinda Young, a public relations person from Seattle who cares for this Giant Sequoia…

I read a couple of releases from Belinda and thought, hmmm… Belinda, PR, female… let me see what kind of stalker-gen I can dig up.  Most of the men on the web have their noses wide open, even if they are too old and - like in my case - too committed to follow through.  So I Google Belinda and find a couple of people who are definitely not her, because if they were her she wouldn’t have time to do what she does, if you get my drift.  So, frustrated in my single search engine effort to dig up any pictures of the lady in her scanties, or something like that, I did what I know how to do and I crafted a little blog post.  (Follow the link here for a change why doncha).

Brian Dunbar stops by here from time to time because - I think - we are both nanotech geeks at heart and would like to see an elevator to the stars.

So Brian sent Belinda a link to my post, and Belinda replied with a rather "who the heck is he" kind of message, and I said, "Hey, I am a legend in my own mind, and a denizen of the long tail," and Belinda said, "Cool, here’s a picture of my tree," and I said, "What, no scanties?" and she said, "What kind of woman do you think I am?" and I said, "Well, that’s what we’re trying to determine isn’t it." And she said, "Look Mister… Let me just refer you to my work."  And I said, "Well that’s where this whole thing started, isn’t it?  You should get a blog." and she said, I have a giant sequoia, why would I need a blog?" and I have to admit she has a good point, so I think we’ll just let the whole thing go for now.

But B?  There are lots of PR people who find blogs useful for connecting and sharing and actually raising the visibility of people and products that they care about.

* * *

Bonus question:  Who originated the concept of something difficult being akin to "trying to nail raspberry jelly to the wall?"

Maybe the publicist got it wrong.  Might have been a typo.

Not that Tony Pierce needs any more readers, but if you’ve come this way, then go that way and check out what he has to say about BlogOn.  Good stuff.  True.  Real.