Category Archives: culture & value

If this was coming to Saint Louis…

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… I would so be there!

The demon-destroying “chosen one” and her evil-fighting team are singing out their deepest, darkest secrets on the big screen, and you can join in. “Once More with Feeling,” the Emmy-nominated musical episode from Joss Whedon’s cult television series “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” is touring the country as an interactive sing-a-long…(source).

As the end credits roll, series mastermind Joss Whedon, who snuck into a back-row seat right after the program began, strides down the aisle. It’s the first Buffy sing-along he’s ever been to, and he has the sheepish, overwhelmed look of someone who’s just received a massive outpouring of love. (source)

And the great thing is that you don’t need DVDs. You can just get practiced up with youtube. For example:
[kml_flashembed movie=”http://www.youtube.com/v/6xolY4Euxh0″ width=”425″ height=”350″ wmode=”transparent” /]

Hat Tip: Jennifer, who told me about it after she heard it on NPR.

Kinetic Scultpure

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I want someone to invent a science fiction story so that this, can be the mode of transportation.

[kml_flashembed movie=”http://www.youtube.com/v/WcR7U2tuNoY” width=”425″ height=”350″ wmode=”transparent” /]Here is an explanation.

[kml_flashembed movie=”http://www.youtube.com/v/-GgOn66knqA” width=”425″ height=”350″ wmode=”transparent” /]

Small is stylish

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Ever since coming back to Macs, I’ve started caring about what computers look like as well as what they can do (Those who know me will recognize this as my “Apple made me shallow” complaint).  I don’t think Mac are the only ones with this sort of appeal.  While posing it with the wine flute seems like overkill, this Sony Vaio is a thing of beauty.

Hopefully, as beauty becomes more and more a sought-after commodity, functionality will become a cheap baseline that more and more of us can afford.  I’ll be content to get my aesthetic fix from the Engadget galleries using anything that works well.

Democracy is easier if the minorities can be terrorized and driven off

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Although the violence appears to be more anarchic than concerted, it has had the same effect as an organized campaign to destroy Iraq’s Assyrians. Virtually every member of the community is under siege….

Christian women are particularly vulnerable. BetBasoo writes: “Often incidents do not end with the prisoner’s release. In one case in Baghdad, the victim committed suicide after the ransom was paid and she went home, because of the torture and sexual violence she suffered. In another case, a young woman talked to her family by phone and told them: ‘I’m dead,’ referring to being gang-raped. She eventually committed suicide whilst still in the hands of her tormentors.”

Read the whole thing.

Show some respect for yourself

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Am I the only one who thinks rhetoric about earning a “black belt” in any sort of business practice is sort of juvenile and silly? I want to get better at GTD, but a “3rd degree Black Belt“? How about a GTD red cape or utility belt? What about D&D?–“become a level 5 druid at GTD!”

Actually, in the last year I’ve been reading on various aspects of the business world and it has made me feel better than I ever have about the Evangelical ghetto. I would go to family counseling conferences dealing with serious issues and see the four personalities (set aside whether there are really four and all that) presented by grown adults to grown adults by hand puppets (lion, otter, beaver, and golden retriever, I think). I’ve seen all sorts of ridiculous training advancement labels being offered as the key to growth and assurance control (how many pastorates have I been told I could only qualify for if I attended that Really Important Seminar[TM]?)

And for many years I have always thought this was a distinctively American Christian form of absurdity. It’s not. Browse the business section of any bookstore.

Oh, and probably in both cultures there is plenty of real value that is being offered. It just has to be made to look stupid in order to gain adherents. I think GTD is great and I would have no prejudice in trying out the program.

I just don’t like the packaging.

Starbuck’s music analyzed at Slate

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This Slate Podcast analyzing the Music sold and played at Starbucks is pretty fun. I notice that I am musically illiterate and that I have problems linking race to music. I guess I feel like their implying the lack of hiphop is a racial issue. Maybe I’m over interpreting.

But this all seems like more evidence that what retailers are really selling. If you want to buy music you can go online and if you want coffee you can buy at your local grocery store and brew it at home. But you go to Starbucks to buy community, attitude, sophistication–image.

Which probably has a lot to do with why I’m listening listening to this podcast.

Hmm… perhaps I should blog about moleskines….

By the way. Starbucks is a great chain (though evidence that I wasn’t a true Seattlite was found in the fact that I didn’t spurn Seattle’s Best Coffee shops). But Panera Bread Company (also St. Louis Bread Company) is much better. Universal free wifi and free refills. You gotta try them.

I’m sure they’ll be selling pretentious music soon as well.

Do hippies need fatherly approval?

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In keeping with my observation on the Kevin MD post about Google and their health advisors, I notice this observation regarding the iPhone:

It is in some ways astonishing that AT&T and Apple are partners at all. AT&T is the oldest of the old school—the most ancient major high-tech firm in the United States, founded in 1878. Unfazed by spending the last 23 years in suspended animation (after the great breakup of 1984), AT&T is back to its classic business model: own the largest networks and everything on them. Apple, meanwhile, is the original hippie computer company, a child of the 1970s, not the 1870s. At least in its origins, Apple is an ideological foe of IBM and AT&T. (Remember that 1984 ad?) Considering that these firms were born on the opposite sides of the tech Kulturkampf, the iPhone cannot help but be a little strange.

Is it strange or is it ubiquitous? The revolutionary envisions a new society and marginalizes himself in the old one to advocate the new. But, whatever his vision, personal eschatology trumps the cosmic. He can envision no better vindication for himself than to have the approval and acceptance of the ancien regime.

That said, I’m still hoping that AT&T will truly want Apple to change them and/or that the Slate writer’s optimistic scenario is true:

If you’re an optimist, the more intriguing possibility is that Apple’s iPhone is a Trojan Horse. The iPhone is fatally attractive to AT&T, since it gives the firm a chance to steal tens of thousands of new customers from rivals like Verizon. But Apple may be betting that, once it has its customers, they’ll be more loyal to Apple than AT&T. With its foothold in the wireless world, Apple may be planning to slowly but inexorably demand more room. If iPhone 2.0 is a 3G phone that works with any carrier and supports third-party apps, then industry power will begin to move away from the carrier oligopoly and toward Apple and other Silicon Valley firms. Now, that would be a revolution.

(Hat tip: Reformed Chicks Blabbing)

On homo-eroticizing history

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OK, I’m late, but I finally figured out why Scalzi is a popular blogger. His post on Today’s Example of an Egregious Use of Something a Writer Once Learned in a Freshman Philosophy Course was completely hysterical and quite right. His target is the claim that movies and philosophies should be labeled homo-erotic (though, careful, he is agreeing with Feeney). Actually, that’s just an aside. His real point is that

More seriously, however, reaching all the way back to Nietzsche and Aristotle to explain why Keanu and Patrick are not [totally deleted because this is a PG blog] is completely unnecessary, the middlebrow cultural commentary equivalent of going after a fly with an axe.

But really, as someone who, in college, loved reading Ayn Rand, the final paragraph was a ROFL moment:

In short: Dragging philosophy into the discussion is not always as effective as you might think it is. Just because Ayn Rand ran to Aristotle for every little thing doesn’t mean it works for everyone. Hell, it didn’t actually work for Ayn Rand. Let’s not get into that now. Although I will say this: if Howard Roark and John Galt ever got together, that would be hot.

About blogging

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I was asked to teach a blogging 101 seminar at a local community college.  Most of it was just leading the participants through a WordPress process.  But below is what I wrote down for myself to talk about.

1. What is a Blog and what is Blogging.

A blog is a web log, a journal of some sort kept on the web. It entails a web site where you can publish entries that are time stamped (Usually the most recent is on top).

Blogging is a simpler way of saying, “I keep a blog,” the way people will say “I keep a diary.”

A blogger is a someone who has a blog.

Typically, a blog is thought of in a way that involves a website control panel that posts in a blog format.

2. The first blogs.

Of course, the first blogs did not have a customized blogging control panel. The first blogs were created by web savvy people who, instead of adding essays or articles or simply updating their home page, decided to start creating journal entries.

http://www.rebeccablood.net/essays/weblog_history.html

In 1998 there were just a handful of sites of the type that are now identified as weblogs (so named by Jorn Barger in December 1997). Jesse James Garrett, editor of Infosift, began compiling a list of “other sites like his” as he found them in his travels around the web. In November of that year, he sent that list to Cameron Barrett. Cameron published the list on Camworld, and others maintaining similar sites began sending their URLs to him for inclusion on the list. Jesse’s ‘page of only weblogs‘ lists the 23 known to be in existence at the beginning of 1999.

Suddenly a community sprang up. It was easy to read all of the weblogs on Cameron’s list, and most interested people did. Peter Merholz announced in early 1999 that he was going to pronounce it ‘wee-blog’ and inevitably this was shortened to ‘blog’ with the weblog editor referred to as a ‘blogger.’

At this point, the bandwagon jumping began. More and more people began publishing their own weblogs. I began mine in April of 1999. Suddenly it became difficult to read every weblog every day, or even to keep track of all the new ones that were appearing. Cameron’s list grew so large that he began including only weblogs he actually followed himself. Other webloggers did the same. In early 1999 Brigitte Eaton compiled a list of every weblog she knew about and created the Eatonweb Portal. Brig evaluated all submissions by a simple criterion: that the site consist of dated entries. Webloggers debated what was and what was not a weblog, but since the Eatonweb Portal was the most complete listing of weblogs available, Brig’s inclusive definition prevailed.

This rapid growth continued steadily until July 1999 when Pitas, the first free build-your-own-weblog tool launched, and suddenly there were hundreds. In August, Pyra released Blogger, and Groksoup launched, and with the ease that these web-based tools provided, the bandwagon-jumping turned into an explosion. Late in 1999 software developer Dave Winer introduced Edit This Page, and Jeff A. Campbell launched Velocinews. All of these services are free, and all of them are designed to enable individuals to publish their own weblogs quickly and easily.

Pitas is still around but I had never head of it back when I started blogging in 1999. I learned blogging from a friend of mine who used blogger and the only other system I remember finding in the early days was http://diary-x.com (which was not be adu1t c0ntent beyond the writing of the bloggers themselves).

Blogger.com was a website from which you could send content to your homepage. However, they also offered free memberships on Blogspot.com so that anyone could start blogging right away. They tried to pay for the system by putting one single banner ad on the top of each blog.

This also became a way for people to naturally learn html. They learned both from their posts (using italics and embedding links) as well as from putting up links and pic in their sidebars. Until recently, blogger gave you access to the entire template including the css stylesheet which was included in the main page rather than a separate file like is done in most websites.

At some point early on, Upsaid appeared. They offered blogs for free but now charge $2 a month.

Not too long afterwards came Greymatter. This was open source software that you installed on your own website. It is still around (though I’m disappointed that the website uses orange).

Movable Type soon followed. Like Greymatter it was for those who owned a website, though it has been used by sites offering free blogs like Chattablogs.

I should meantion three blog systems that also appeared, though some of these tended to be seen as “virtual communities” along the lines of the later myspace.com rather than pure blogs. In a sense, I simply didn’t notice these because they seem to appeal to a younger user.

  • Livejournal.com (Wikipedia entry) 1999
  • Typepad.com 2005 — considered the largest paid blogging service in the world. I notice that lots of professionals use it, but since I never pay for this kind of thing, I am not one of them.
  • Xanga.com (Wikipedia entry) 1998 as a music and book review community. I don’t have much knowledge of Xanga because I find it aesthetically painful whenever I visit.

3. Blogging Now

The most recent blogging news has been WordPress (both as a free blogging program and as a free site for blogging) and Blogger’s recent upgrade. WordPress.com is great, but it doesn’t allow you to “weaponize” your blog for income, nor to embed video. In both these cases the free account at blogger is better.

Other kinds of web logs have come into being. Audioblogging (see Hipcast.com) and vlogging on youtube are now possible. To an extent, these aren’t done that often because audio and video podcasting have also developed.

Google not only made the banner ad go away from blogspot.com, but they invented Adsense.com which enables you to put ads on your blog and get money from them. Some blogs have been highly successful. Dooce.com (no link due to content warning) was, last I heard, still able to pay their house mortgage with their revenues from blog advertizing.

See also, Text Link Ads.

Blogging was part of the move from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 and it provided a market for a bunch of new services and social networking sites, like delicious, which has applications for blogs. Also, some services are specifically aimed at blogs, like Technorati.com. Other services have sprung up like Cocomment.com and specialized search engine features on google.

This has all lead to new ways of marketing. For more see Copyblogger.com, Problogger.com, and others.

Bulldog reporter:

Over lunch with a prominent PR industry blogger recently, he was lamenting that PR people seem hopelessly out of touch with today’s revolution in PR technology. I noted that PR practitioners had already missed one huge technology opportunity for lack of trying: Control of the corporate website. We had the chance to command this primary corporate communications tool, and we let it slip through our fingers. Today, we’re lucky if IT lets us have an online newsroom (and even most online newsrooms are embarrassingly effete).

Today we have a second chance. It’s an exciting and historically momentous time to be in the communications business. We now have the power to communicate our messages—in words, video and audio—to hundreds of millions of people around the globe in seconds. And those millions of people can communicate right back to us just as quickly. Interactive technology, broadband telecommunications, search, social media—these things are revolutionizing not only the way we communicate, but also how we function as communities and as a society. These technologies are beginning to affect profoundly the way we interact politically, socially and of course, commercially. As communicators, the question we should ask ourselves as we stand looking out on our profession’s horizon is: How has our experience prepared us for this moment in time, in history and this juncture in our professional lives?

Experience is a funny—deceptive—thing. Experience can provide you with a body of knowledge and received wisdom, and it can give you an intuitive sense of how to respond to the challenges springing up around you. As a general notion that’s good. But I’m starting to wonder if experience is always the most important quality we can bring to the table.

Blogging also promises to change the shape of intellectual interchange. Journals are still around and so is peer review. But now mavericks have a voice.

How quickly we become strangers to ourselves

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[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/I1ON42WberY" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

I post this because I think it shows how strange we become to ourselves. Do you notice that the singer is the only one without a tie. What was the dress code and why was he exempt?

This took place fewer than five years before I was born but it looks like footage from another planet.

Hat tip: Dawn Patrol