“When you aren’t blogging and talking about social media and software, what do you actually DO in life? Tell me something echo-free.”

The answers are awesome. And normal. And human. People play guitar, paint, do some fairly interesting jobs; ride BMX, sketch, read books (wtf!), run, sell bicycles and even build robots! Which shouldn’t be surprising. But it is.

I am learning things about people I’ve known for a while. Did it never occur to us not to ask? If we aren’t part of a solution, we’re part of the problem.

As a human, a brother, sister, mother or father. A son or daughter. Outside the echo chamber of web geeks chattering about web geek things, what do you do?

Long time readers know that I exist in many virtual worlds and game worlds, and am far more patient than my fellow avatars when it comes to dealing with early prototypes and concepts.

I figured I’d write a misleading headline as well, but only to illustrate how my brain works.

In the upcoming release of Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto IV, is a utility that enables a player to tag a song in the game, and later purchase it from Amazon.com. Both the Playstation 3 and Xbox have stores to purchase media such as songs and videos.

Could Apple’s’virtual shopping’ patent lead to this?

It wouldn’t be hard to fantasize that Apple could take the patent and explore things like making the iTunes Store part of something that lives on the Nintendo Wii– perhaps relating to any fitness title; Wii Sports or the upcoming Wii Fit. Apple already has a relationship with Nike, and the dots aren’t that hard to connect to see an iTMS + Wii + Nike -styled ‘virtual’ interface in a seemingly normal environment.

Generally, we all know how Second Life has been hyped and criticized, from success and failed corporate initiatives, to the silly social commentary people make about furries, flying penises, and of course, ‘getting a first life’. An Apple Store inside of Second Life wouldn’t be an Apple experience at all– in fact, I can only run Second Life on my Windows machines now, as its performance on Apple is the worst.

However, imagining a place (with avatars or not), directly tying together my fitness, my shoes, and some non-’weird’ and well-performing environment (a Nintendo is quite normal and understood), is not so terribly hard to do.

MacNN, I dig you guys, but that headline sucked.

What say you, infocalyptics?

Update at the end of post. The feature I’m griping about here IS there, but heh, poorly implemented. Sorry guys, it’s an iPhone world we live in. Be like Apple. I’m not going to delete this post. Skip to the end.

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Some software can be palatable with simple toggles: on/off. That’s my solution for the FriendFeed team regarding this ‘feature’. I discovered odd behavior with the aggregator site, where I have around 400 people following me. I used to follow around 200, but only by way of importing my address book. I was too lazy to go on the big ‘add, add, add’ crusade.

Recently, I ditched everyone and started over. To start, I follow only 10 people. What a great way to manage the noise!

I don’t follow Jason Calacanis or Jeremy Hall, but I know people who do.

Then I noticed something weird. I was getting updates from people I do not follow.

Eventually, I figured it out, with the help of some folks on Twitter and Flickr, commenting that this is a feature that a lot of people are apparently happy about. If one of the people you follow (a ‘friend’) makes a comment on someone else’s post (who you don’t follow), you will see the other person’s post in your feed, regardless of whether or not you follow them or not.

This puts me in the position of having to choose whether to friend/follow someone based on who they associate with… hey, that’s neat! “I’d follow you but yeah, not with the company YOU keep!” Social, indeed. I currently follow Louis Gray, a local tech guy here in the Valley. However, because he comments on posts from people I don’t want to follow (Calacanis, for example, sorry J-dawg), I’m faced with ‘do I remove Louis or not?’. Guilt by association. Yay, social!

Apparently, SocialThing is not reported to have this issue.

This kind of thing normally wouldn’t warrant a post from me except: I’m trying to reduce noise. I’ve also unsubscribed from Scoble, someone I like and have known for a lot of years, as a test of the efficiency (or not) of these socially-focused services. I still get Scoble’s datastream in various places, Friendfeed included. My tests are so far proving successful.

It’s not as easy as it sounds, ‘just unsubscribe’.

UPDATE: Louis points out that you CAN do this, but even then it took me a second. Here’s a nice big screenshot and instructions how to do it. Don’t be afraid that ‘hide’ which has no indicator of more options (like a triangle or ellipses) will destroy stuff. It actually will prompt you with this:

You don’t have all the options up front, there’s ‘More Hide Options’ as a link which expands even further. The snag for me, like I mentioned above was non-consistent UI that did not indicate an expandable option. Best example: see the “More” link next to “Hide”.

Two lessons learned (well maybe three, I seriously have been dwelling on this all day, trying to figure out what the problem was first), is 1. Louis is saved from the chopping block and 2. UI design is SO critical and 3. Perhaps the rush into all these apps compounds the frustration with them

If anyone has experience with Revolution Pro Media, drop me a line. It’s great (makes the blog feel less blog-ish and more media-ish), and I really want to use it–I just wasn’t planning on my day being sucked up by support (I followed a youtube link embedding tutorial PERFECTLY and no such luck. I’m not an idiot.). So I’ve rolled back to Copyblogger theme.

I’ll get to it when I get to it.

Update: Playing with The Masterplan: The morning after

With trucks, however, I seem a huge lack of great concept art or ideas that do not involve a) whatever Hummer is doing b) large Japanese dekotoru-inspired (over the top, space-age designed big rigs). And simply making the gaping maw on the front of a typical Ford of Chevy is just not doing it for me.

I have been inspired enough to spend a lot of time digging for the same level of awesome (in my eyes) for trucks, which I fully appreciate are lacking in popularity compared to their car cousins. Another theory on why there’s such a lack of inspiring trucks, is that there is far more going on with regards to the functionality and technology of trucks: cargo capacity and on- or off-roading capabilities are two basic examples.

Here are three so far that I’ve found that get me interested a bit. (Note: I do not include SUVs, but sometimes it’s unavoidable as there are so many hybrid designs; I also include Jeeps) Let me know if you have favorites and I’ll dig through those.

Jeep Hurricane
If there was ever a tough, sci-fi mountain killer I’d love, it would be this. I’d probably be conservative and get the SINGLE engine one, but still. Torn from the pages of Halo, it’s time for the Jeep to look alive! And to do with with 670 hp of dual HEMI power *and* a crab steer footing? Where’s my plasma rifle?

Dodge Rampage
So, I’m not fully sold on a front-wheel drive truck, but, I’m going a bit more for aesthetics and functionality. I love the idea of a vehicle being so flexible that you could envision it physically docking to a building, becoming this mobile extended room. Read the article to see the bed/cab design. This was a 2006 prototype.

Nissan NV200
Yeah, it’s not a truck, it’s a van, and expands and is full-on mobile comm center. Would love to see a completely off-road package for mobile deployment. Nissan previously showed the Terranaut, a science-lab Land Rover-esque vehicle, probably far more practicaly to manufacture.

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My own truck is a Chevy Colorado, a small (read: mid-size) truck with a five cylinder with the supposed power of a v6. In looking at the concepts of the Colorado, I only see limited inspiration in these. Utility is most important, but can’t it be done with a little dabble of future-ness?

vs.

I want to hear from you, what you think are the trucks plausibly plucked from the future. Either the choices are slim, or I’m just not looking in the right places.

You probably don’t know who Karoli is. She prolly isn’t live on Qik.com (come chat now!) You DO however, probably know the names of everyone who has weighed in on the Twitter auction, waxing on and on about community and is it right and people aren’t for sale and so on and so forth. You might know some hot shit Forrester analyst or some hot shit Stanford-bred venture capitalist, and they probably know their stuff about ’social’ things. You might know of people that have bid, you might know a lot of things, I’m sure.

Karoli writes on her site drumsandwhistles.com about the auction of Andrew Baron’s twitter account. She writes two very fundamental things. 1. She doesn’t give a crap one way or the other about it 2. She shows what that money being awarded (or those that bid towards that) could be spent on.

“Let’s think about what $1,550 could do. Especially on a day where there are food riots around the world, people here in our own country are going hungry, food banks are literally begging for donations, and the World Food Bank may well be bankrupt. Some examples:

Could fund microloans to help people in underprivileged countries to start businesses, farms , etc to become self-sufficient. Average microloan is $25.00 That’s 62 businesses that could be funded.
In Nepal, it buys a year’s worth of health care for 775 women and children
In Afghanistan, it provides reproductive healthcare and education to 1,240 women.
In Darfur, it trains 124 Traditional Birthing Attendants to care for pregnant women and newborn children.
In South Africa, it provides HIV/AIDS counseling to 124 women.
In Burkina Faso, it feeds 5,167 students one good meal every day.
In Africa, it would fund the construction of 10 fresh water wells
It can feed, clothe and school an orphan child for over a year.”

Because of the ‘mechanics’ of how social and tech blog news flows, this most likely won’t see the light of day. I’m linking to it anyway, because she’s right. I believe there are smart people out there. I also believe there are plenty of chickenshit people out there (how many in your RSS feeds?)

Here’s the link to her post which has links scattered throughout the above list: “My Challenge to Andrew Baron“. If you have any weight in this so-called ‘industry’ of social media, then use it. Be brutal. So you got unfollowed? Fuck ‘em.

Sometimes there are things more important than what we think we know.

Thanks for the reality check Ms. Karoli. (Thanks QueenOfSpain for the tip).

The thing called ‘blogging’ has undergone quite a transformation from its early days, when cats and cheese sandwich stories ran amok on the Web. To a certain extent, that kind of thing still happens. There are blogs for newspapers and blogs on topics and blogs everywhere for any reason, for any business model, for any purpose.

The idea is that of ‘voice’.

The label, though, is getting to me. It starts to feel a little sub-human. The fact that we like labels as humans isn’t a surprise to me, however. Look at how many address each other by the software they use. “Seesmicers” or “Youtubers” or “Second Lifers”.

The issue is jargon. My split life between alpha geeks and normal people shows this. I rarely hear about my ‘blog’ outside of the tech circles I live in– no, I hear about my site or ‘that piece you wrote on your site’.

By not being a ‘blogger’, I don’t for a minute think that I’m a journalist (don’t know if I’d ever want to be one), nor a columnist (which journo friends say I could be. Being called a ‘writer’ has a far more important vibe to it, perhaps the opposite of ‘blogger’, which seems to have a more amaterurish flavor about it.

I’m not necessarily the best writer of words, yet I’ve never expected to have ever written so many words. I want to get better, I want to learn skills of journalism and such. I just feel that label is more a curse than a blessing. While that mind sound drastic, there’s nothing unique about it anymore if everyone does it. (Which is my beef with social media not really being an industry if everyone supposedly does it– maybe we need a ‘breathing industry’?)

Anyway, I’ve think of this every time I look at my URL which has /blog in it. I think of this every time I hear something about ‘bloggers’, like those that can write and gain an audience are some weird breed of caged monkey flinging feces at the computer screen (lately though, well, yeah, you get the idea). I also have been deeply involved in many forms of online media at very early stages. Depending on who you ask, some would call me a podcaster, vlogger, blogger, and my absolutely least favorite, a Second Lifer. Why does no one call me an ‘XBOXer’ or ‘Playstationer’ or uh, yeah, you get the idea.

I’m not sure how to change this other than working as hard as possible to drop even the most gentle jargon. If I recall correctly, none of my podcasts ever had the WORD ‘podcast’ in it, to avoid the isolation that might inadvertently come if I pursued deals in mediums other than automatically-downloaded-media-files.

And out there, in scary, scary normal people land, explaining this takes time away from talking about content and talking about definitions.

How can I (or you) talk about the next great idea if we have to spend so much time explaining the lingo?

Anyway, these are my idle thoughts and musings for a warm Saturday afternoon. I have no bitchmemes to link to, I have no me-too comments. I just have this minor conceptual problem floating around in my head.

Maybe you do too?

I’m sorry, what did you just say?

Long time readers and pals will know, I’m not one of those ‘get offended’ types. The world’s effed up, it is what it is, deal with it. I was taken slightly aback by this.

I ask my son, ‘What did they say a nerd was?’ to which he makes a comment about pants being too short. ‘Yes, but did they say what a nerd was?’

No response. Really Awkward Silence. (He probably thought he was in sort of trouble because I got that tone. And he’s right. I did have that tone.

I call my wife. She knew about it. Apparently my son didn’t want to participate, so he went to school in the typical full dress uniform for a Friday, and came back home with part of it (he had a loaner ‘nerd’ shirt on).

To remind people who might have forgotten, yes, this is Silicon Valley. Home to where a lot of nerds build things like HP, Apple, eBay, Google, AMD, Intel, and so on and so on and so on.

My subtext here is pretty obvious. My wife tells me to inquire about it nicely. And seeing how probably several parents and faculty from the school read my blog, here’s where ‘decorum’ must come into play. And by ‘decorum’ I mean I will only gently address issues of how recently in our history the ‘nerd’ thing was a clever stereotype of a group of people. I will also gently mention some irony in the ultra-smart nerds that this school (and many like it) will generate (I learned Latin in 5th grade). And yes, we’re in Silicon Valley, so, well, you can kind of see where this is going.

So, um, yeah.

I personally don’t have an opinion. I’m an artist, I make media, in any form that’s presented to me. I’m also a paying customer of Flickr. I use the service to post photos from my Canon 20D, photos from my iPhone and N95, screenshots from my desktop and video games, and now, video.

Today I had a thought, however, about this ‘moving photo’ spin that Yahoo has been dishing out. That phrase is something quite easy for me to smirk at, given that there’s only have 90 seconds of total running time, and video does not equal photos. So, I wondered. What if it wasn’t Flickr who needed to change, instead, it’s us? What if we turned the cameras not on ourselves, but away from us? Can we learn a new skill? What if we studied this new sliver of a video genre?

Jay Dedman, one of videoblogging’s early pioneers, had several videos that were just snapshots in time…. ‘moments showing’… that’s about the only term I can think of to describe this. It’s not us ‘performing’, it’s us, watching, observing…seeing.

So I tried to have a go at it. A living snapshot:

Bonus video from Jay Dedman from July of 2004: Freaking out, quietly. Thanks, Jay.

First, some explanations for the diverse audience here. Half of you don’t talk about things like ‘blogospheres’ and ’social media’, you just use these things–you post to myspace, text your friends, and just use it. The other half of you are the ones who ‘work in’ or ‘consult’ on social media. And the word ‘blogosphere’, while meaning ‘a whole wide open frontier of people who blog’ really ends up referring to the ‘hip, anti-establishment web development techie‘ blogosphere. You probably know a lot of people who look at how it all works.

A well known cartoonist close to this ‘web creator class’, recently declared his ‘quitting’ of Twitter, a site where you can post your status (much like facebook) to the world or your friends in 140 characters or less. (Some users just hammer on it like a slow-motion chat room).

On a popular technology news aggregator, this is the top story, since, plenty of people have an opinion one way or the other about it. The sheer fascination around certain products like Twitter and Friendfeed has fascinated me— this time, in the mind space of mental health and psychology.

Is the early adopter class of these endless streams of new web apps (the ones that beg for beta invites), particularly those social in nature, sufferers of ADHD or OCD or form of insecurity?

And it’s a big question (and a question so as not to imitate the NYTimes’ three-makes-a-trend type of journalism so present with the ‘blogging will kill you’ story). It’s a big question because it might mean taking a hard look at ourselves and our purported leadership and ask, “Do they have some mental health disorders?” It’s uncomfortable and awkward, and honestly, I don’t expect to see hail mary posts of ‘Yes, I have a problem with attention deficit and am insecure and needy’ or ‘I’m an attention whore and this fills that void in my life’ or ‘I have problems socializing outside and it’s easier with a keyboard’.

I have reasonable doubt that we’re as normal as we think. I’ve caught myself looking at people I know and respect and wonder about what makes them tick under the hood. Some of them seem to exhibit very common behavior of (insert generic Three Letter Acronym disorder here).

And for those of us involved in building the Facebooks and Twitters of the future, is it possible that our own disorders get coded into the very design of the products we release, further propagating the possible problems?

Humans are humans and sometimes the tools are mere magnifiers. But, I felt the need to ask anyway. What say you?

Record your video and add it to the group 90secondgear on Flickr.

The topics: DMCA, privacy, identity, harrassment, terms of service.

In many corners of the internet, we are afforded the ability to create pseudonyms and alias– in the forms of login names, handles, and so on. We do this for a couple of reasons, maybe we’ve used the same nickname for years or maybe we prefer to operate under an anonymous alias for whatever reason.

Individual A is an anonymous content creator, making a variety of digital goods that are for sale online. Individual A uses an e-commerce service to sell this items. Individual A sees that Individual B is on the e-commerce site is selling stolen versions of Individual A’s product.

Important detail to note: Both individuals A and B are members of a popular social network, and the e-commerce service is a third party application that enables members of the social network to buy and sell digital goods. The social network does have a clause in the terms of service that says personal information is not to be disclosed.

Individual A files a DMCA complaint to the e-commerce site, who forwards the complaint to the offending party, Individual B. The issue at hand is that Individual A’s personal information was passed along to Individual B. The social network all parties are involved in, does not do this. If YOU were the recipient of a DMCA complaint, you would be notified but no personal information would be passed on.

Many third party applications and services allegedly follow this model. The e-commerce site that both Individuals A and B use, claims they are unable to comply with the DMCA by withholding information, and sent the entire DMCA complaint to Individual B (the one accused of selling the stolen work of Individual A).

Here’s where it’s sticky. Apparently, Individual B is engaged in harassing behavior against Individual A, someone who preferred to remain anonymous, because Individual A’s personal information was exposed by the e-commerce site.

The short version: An anonymous content creator who was filing a DMCA complaint to an e-commerce site against another individual, had personal information exposed, which is now being used by the accused for harassment purposes.

Perhaps the title of this post is a bit snap, to question whether or not people who have no verifiable identity should be allowed to engage in commerce. Terms of service, third party services– a whole lot of factors go into making rules; as do the privacy and data ownership rules of various countries.

What is your thought on this issue?

Reminder: in order to preserve focus on the issue, I’m leaving out what social networks, services and people are involved. Try and do the same in the comments if at all possible.

Dragonforce, Through the Fire and Flames
Discovered: Guitar Hero
Well, it’s not technically true that I found it in the Guitar Hero video game, since I’m not that good. It IS true that I found videos of people playing that song in GH on Youtube. That song is so awful and so funny and so old school and so awesome that I *had* to have it. And playing it on my modest system of 800 watts is enough to cause panic in my brain cells.

Does it Offend You, Yeah? We are Rockstars
Discovered: Satellite Radio
Hey, it’s still radio, but it’s not Clear Channel radio. And I was pleasantly surprised to hear this track on my least favorite satellite network (Sirius, I’m totally an XM guy all the way). First instinct? Take a snapshot of the screen so I could remember to buy the track later. In fact, I bought the whole album.

Death from Above 1979 - Blood On Our Hands (Justice Remix)
Discovered: Viddler (a video site like Youtube but cleaner, more features, and less idiots)
Some overly tired engineer decided it would be fun to lipsync to the video at 2am. OMG he totally broke the law (if he didn’t have permission to use the music). He naturally credited the band. The song rocked. I googled them. Found the music on Youtube. Youtube’s not just a place for bad performance art and cat videos; people collect media. That’s illegal of course, look out for the law, but still. Fans celebrate, some fans might buy, record industry panics. Go home and let us love your slaves. I bought the song.

Naturally, I immediately post the cheese-sandwichness of my morning jam session drive to Twitter (a sort of web-based minutia chat/status thing popular among the early adopter ego-geek set). What resulted was the mention of two other bands that I have searched for, found on YouTube, and seeing if I like them enough to head back to iTunes to purchase a few tracks. Yay for friends with great test in music (HAY AKI).

This is the ecosystem of music today, the one the recording industry is so unbelievably reluctant to make work for them. But hey, it works for me, and probably for you too.

It might seem odd to group these three services together with the broad label of ‘anti-social media’. Allow me a moment of indulgence.

One of the characteristics of various sites labeled as ’social media/networks’ is the outright display of friends/followers and subscribers. Perhaps this is useful or perhaps this accelerates a certain type of alpha-monkey behavior. Regardless, these three services have unique anecdotes as they relate to me and more importantly, anti-social media.

Chatterous is a simple, web-based chat service that has the persistent archival that Twitter does. (While Twitter was originally designed as a status/presence updater, emergent user behavior turned parts of it into a chat room.) 140 character limits mean nothing if we can keep posting over and over and over). Chatterous does not currently make a big deal about who you know, only who is present. This could reflect natural behavior. Someone coming and going has a much different feel than someone following and un-following. Even then, does it matter who follows me? Maybe it does, but we’ll get to that a bit later. Sitting idle in a Chatterous room feels similar to sitting idle in IRC or other chat service. The conversation is happening and you can choose to jump in or not. The volume can be heavy, when conversation is heavy, but goes in waves and is perhaps more relevant because of a slightly higher and more controlled barrier to entry. (Although, not much)

Chatterous also makes the ‘chat’ (they call them groups), password protected by default (while providing outstanding interfaces to the service by way of web, sms, gtalk and e-mail). To me, it’s not so much to be private (I’ve published the password to my little slice o’ web chat), it’s more about discrete, off-to-the-side/background communication. While we’re being social, we’re being somewhat anti-social, but not broadcasting to the world everytime we blink.

XBOX Live might seem like an unlikely service to write about, unless one considers the buddy list and its existence on the console and the web. Microsoft, getting into the social game a bit deeper, opened up the ability to view anyone’s buddy list (18 and up), without asking permission.

The difference between broadcasting a gamertag and broadcasting a buddy list is that I made a decision to share my gamertag on Xbox Live. I did not choose to share my buddy list– Microsoft did that for me– and I had to block the viewing of it. Anti-social, indeed. And respectful of my circle of friends.

Finally, we come to LinkedIn, a business-oriented social network that focuses on the networking, minus all the silly Facebookian pokes and vampire bites. Trouble is, not always does one wish to share relationships in public. Can a judgement be made against me based on perceived associations? Can my connection to another be manipulated where a third party uses me to get through to someone I know? (Would you want to be connected to, say, a talented programmer who is a known Scientologist? Heh) Finally, does that publicly-displayed number of ‘connected’ people change my behavior for better or worse?

Naturally, the notion of throttling is waving a middle finger in the face of ‘openness’ and ‘transparency’– two ideals that are thrust upon us by the designers of such sites. Nothing in social media is new– only that technology adds hyper-magnification to an already established structure of social graces. Some people show off, some people manipulate, and others sit back quietly. Our gossip and speculation is driven by what we see, rather than what we’ve been told or heard through a grapevine. Social media is just humanity, magnified by technology, and not an industry or ’space’.

At the beginning of the year, I proclaimed 2008 the year of anti-social media– something not remedied by lack of participation or involvement, but being allowed the choice of discretion and control that isn’t always assumed in modern-day socially-driven software architecture.

This one, though. Yeah, this one? It would hurt. This camp would be about how to become better. Not to ‘collaborate’ or to ‘network’. But one to walk in kinda stupid-like, and walk out all impresario’d and ninja. Walk in empty-handed, walk out with work done, launched, live.

Most importantly would be the breakout sessions, naturally.

Joe Clark would chain the doors. “Discipline is not the enemy of enthusiasm!”

Jules would continue, “…you happen to pull this shit while I’m in a transitional period so I don’t wanna kill you, I wanna help you…”

“Put. That coffee. Down. Coffee’s for closers.”, Blake notes.

Something like an real boot camp. Multiple days, weeks. Rock solid agenda. The output: is razor sharp focus, attention, management. Determination. Completion. Wouldn’t that be a hoot?

We sink, we swim, we rise, we fall - We meet our fate together. -Joe Clark, “Lean on Me”.
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other quotes from Glengarry Glen Ross and Pulp Fiction, respectively

I logged into SocialThing and saw that a friend posted a link about a neat architectural concept. I was about to reply, until I saw that I couldn’t. What I would have been replying to, was his Facebook status, which was really, a Twitter post, piped over to Facebook, and slurped into SocialThing.

We can’t help ourselves being accidentally spammy, either. In FriendFeed, I choose NOT to include BOTH of my flickr accounts (one flickr account is for normal things, the other is for video game things only). Unlike Jaiku, you can’t clearly tell that you can unsubscribe to a *part* of me. So I’ve just skipped it entirely.

And what happens when I post a link on Twitter to the photo because I think it might have more importance to people, and I have no knowledge of who follows me where and with what service? My aggrepublishlatform will display it all. (Try it, unsubscribe to Scoble completely, and you will still get his content in triplicate, heh.)

It has gotten out of control.

And we keep feeding the machine of erratic software design with our erratic behavior. For all that we’ve hoped to achieve with becoming “We the Media”, some of us have not even figured out HOW to publish.

The software companies (read: people who make little free web apps) are perpetuating our own lack of social (media) skills.

I tend to like aggregator sites like FriendFeed and SocialThing because I think of their use by me as a way to be considerate to people who want to read/follow me. You can be sure that everything I feel that is important to me, will be in a FriendFeed, without shoving a cluttered blog with fifty million ‘Share This!’ links, icons, and whatnot in the sidebar. To be a cultural snob against MySpace for a moment: just because we have white backgrounds and reflect-y logos, doesn’t make us better than MySpacers. We’re just as informationally schizo.

If there’s ever a reason to appreciate the pseudo-coherency of older capital “B” Big Media, this would be it. True, they don’t make it easy to get content on every social network that captures our attention in the last seven minutes. Who knows, they’d probably have to shove more advertising down our throats to offset the work it takes to manage this.

And even then, we’d see the same content over and over and over again.

The state of social media is horrid and we are too blind and stubborn to see it and believe it. We are hyper-redundant users and developers seem to be building features for features’ sake (does invite-only Qik need to talk to invite-only Seesmic, while BOTH providing ways to ping Twitter? Seriously.) And the most appalling of all of this? For all the empowerment we’ve been given, our own lack of organizational and publishing skills doesn’t help the critical mass.

How do we fix this?

Update: Some supporting pictures of the weirdness:

http://flickr.com/photos/ericrice/2360877028/
http://flickr.com/photos/ericrice/2359951767/
http://flickr.com/photos/ericrice/2359290441/

Update 2: Since my blog is piped through Jaiku and Friendfeed, and people have the ability to comment THERE as well, I have to either a) traipse around looking for the comments, or b) assume that those comments/conversation won’t be part of comments/conversation HERE. Whose job is this anyway? Heh.

from maku.jp

Some of you know that I was not at SXSW this year, as I was grid skipping my way around Tokyo, Japan instead. Prior to leaving, however, I did make up a list of the panels that I would be attending if I went to SXSW.

Here’s the list. Post your thoughts about these specific panels and your thoughts on the contents, ideas for the future etc, and please don’t post about the non-keynote. I don’t really care.

Enjoy!

Eric Rice’s Absentee SXSW Panel Picks:

Friday, March 7th
3:30 pm · How to Rawk SXSW: The Basics
5:00 pm · Pro Gamers: New Extreme Athletes of the 21st Century

Saturday, March 8th
10:00 am · What Teens Want Online & On Their Phones
11:30 am · You Are Here: Gaming and User’s Geolocation in Web 2.0

FOUR-way tie for 2:00pm
2:00 pm · Getting Unstuck: From Desktop to Device
2:00 pm · Taking Your Web Talent to the Video Game Industry
2:00 pm · Location-based Entertainment, Animating Overlooked Spaces
2:00 pm · Online Extremism - And the Muslims Who Fight It
3:30 pm · High-Tech Craft: Why Sewing and Knitting Still Matter
5:00 pm · Core Conversation: Perma-Live-Vlogging: Vicious or Victory, Hell or Sweet?
5:00 pm · Social Network Coups: The Users are Revolting!

Sunday, March 9th
10:00 am · The Female Takedown of Casual Gaming
11:30 am · The Real Dragon: Understanding the Web and Digital Media in China –OR– (for the laughs):
11:30 am · “I’m Internet Famous”: Status in Social Media
2:00 pm · Mobileactive: How Mobile Technology Impacts Politics and Vice Versa
3:30 pm · Core Conversation: Opening the Web to Linguistic Realities
3:30 pm · Where Are The Black Tech Bloggers?
5:00 pm · Core Conversation: Mobile Media You Can Move To

Monday, March 10th

10:00 am · Beyond the Blogosphere: How Online Talent is Being Developed Offline
11:30 am · Self Replicating Awesomeness: The Marketing of No Marketing **Note, this panel interests me, but it would either really excite me or really piss me off. Disclaimer, I know the panelists.**
2:00 pm · none
3:30 any of the video game panels, sans the SL marketing one
5:00 pm · Bio-Networks: Using Mobile Technology to Impact Healthstyle

Tuesday, March 11th
10:00 sleep in
11:30 am · How to Rawk After SXSW: Staying Inspired
2:00 pm · Tuesday Keynote: Jane McGonigal
3:30 pm · MASH Notes: A Military Surgeon’s Videoblog from Iraq
5:00 pm · Futurists’ Sandbox: Scenarios for Social Technologies in 2025

Tomorrow, another page is written as the travels continue from Tokyo to Silicon Valley.

Always make your journeys matter.

I like to dream yes, yes, right between my sound machine
On a cloud of sound I drift in the night
Any place it goes is right
Goes far, flies near, to the stars away from here

これは、魔法のじゅうたんに乗る。 Steppenwolf.

That’s efficiency!

We leave Sunday morning for a very long flight into the future. Destination: Tokyo.

The first phase of my yet-to-be-named project is to boost the digital photographic presence of the town, by way of my favorite photo site, Flickr, owned by Yahoo. Once the weather clears up, I want to put out the call for a full-blown Photowalking week down here–a week, mainly because the place is big, and the amount of wildlife and nature combined with a traditionally picturesque downtown strip, means there’s a lot of ground to cover. Literally.

Yet before that, it makes sense to go retroactive with the photos we’ve already taken– a simple search for ““Morgan Hill” or “95037” on Flickr can show that. Even if you’ve only passed through, please go back and find those photos and place them on the map if at all possible. That’s called geotagging– assigning latitude and longitude coordinates for a picture.

For those that are familiar with Google Earth, (the 3D virtual browser for Mac and PC), you’ll notice the red dots appear when using the Flickr to Google Earth layer developed by Metal Toad Media (see picture above). If we do this right, Morgan Hill can be blanketed with dots.

And if you have the urge to break in a new camera, there’s no better place than here. We’ve got a ton of space to start.

But I noticed something weird.

All the picture icons that exist (an awesome feature) are not as abundant as I’d think.

Let’s face it, Tokyo is a geek mecca and photogenic to the zillionth power. Why is this place not buried in photos?

Because Google appears to only use Panoramio for the photo sources, not something like Flickr. And why should they? Flickr is a Yahoo joint. Google wants you to use Google’s stuff.

I’ll be thundering through photos in Tokyo, and they are all going on Flickr, where I have just shy of 2,000 photos published. None of those will appear on Google Earth at this time. That makes me sad. And, it makes me hopeless for various ‘open’ initiatives working well. I find my lack of faith disturbing.

When it comes to photos, I’m loyal to Flickr; when it comes to search, it’s Google, not Yahoo. When it comes to virtual earth? It’s Google, not Microsoft. Instant messaging? (I don’t need to answer this, it goes on ad nauseum, illustrating my own scattered use of web software, which I suspect isn’t -weird- per se)

How does this get fixed? Not just for getting Flickr photos inside of Google Earth (Of course there’s a hack, yay, but not from Google), but on a much larger scale.

We’re leaving on March 2nd and coming back on the 11th. For the first few days upon entering Japan, we’ll be in Chiba, and then staying in Shinjuku for the rest of the week. Almost confirmed are a Seesmic Japan meetup, a visit to Zooomr’s office, as well as Centric’s local office. There’s actually a rather large population of web/tech types and 2.0 types in Tokyo, both native and foreign, and luckily, I’ve been able to pick brains about a few things, and it has been tremendously helpful.

I should be writing.

Is ‘not getting it’ not so much an indicator of ‘lack of understanding’ as in, “I don’t -get- quantum physics” (which uh, I don’t get. ) or is it a social judgement passed on based on your own perceptions of what/how people use something.

I point to MySpace and Second Life as prime targets of people’s disdain. Of both of these systems, they are fairly straightforward, both containing a number of things that we most surely DO get. One being an organized collection of contacts, communication channels, media sharing, all on a public and/or private scale. The other is a social interactive space surrounding 3D technology where user-generated content is key. Also, client-server software, 3D modeling, rights management, etc– all things fundamentally, we DO get.

When stating ‘not getting it’, it’s important to closely analyze why. When i whittle away what conceptually one might not ‘get’ about say, Second Life, the ONLY thing that I can see (based on people’s commentary), is a judgement on people socializing and creating content. When I think of the mySpace hatred, it’s less about ‘oh it lacks this technology or is written in this or that language’ and more about ‘it’s such a ghetto’. I infer that as a social discrimination or prejudice.

Do you think you’re better than someone that hangs out on myspace? Do you think that your social interaction and content creation on a blog or social network is better than the social interaction or content creation that people might do inside Second Life?

For some reason, the more I see/read/watch people make statements about a group of people, the more I hear that racial vibe of ‘you all look alike’.

So what do you think? Is ‘not getting it’ indicative a problem that’s not based in a lack of technical understanding but more in a place of social prejudices?

But let’s talk around that issue for a moment.

Skimming, scanning, skipping… this can’t be entirely good, can it? To share a comment I posted on Mathew Ingram’s blog,

“The ’scanning’ culture means that we’re short attention span, impatient, and becoming so brief in our consumption, that who knows, we’re probably getting dumber. We don’t read manuals, license agreements, hell, Shakespeare might become popular again if we can sum it up in 140 characters or less right?

Combine that with the fact that possibly we might just be untrained in presenting and getting to the point.

So I’ll ask again, is it the tools or is it ‘us’ that’s the problem? “

Is it the tools’ fault that we might not know how to be effective consumers OR producers?

And even then, is ‘being effective’ an absolute?

The next time a plane crashes into a building in your town, a zillion Qik/PocketCaster/Flixwagon users probably won’t be a bad thing, even if they don’t hold the camera still. Or you can write a blog post about it and Twitter the highlights.

Cuz like, people are busy.