Social Kapital

Photo

Fri, 17 Jun 2011 14:20:31 -0700

"I really like seeing people move from thinking about it to doing it."

Fri, 17 Jun 2011 14:17:43 -0700

“I really like seeing people move from thinking about it to doing it.”

The Sidewalk

Tue, 19 Apr 2011 16:09:42 -0700

The Sidewalk

When you told me you went for a walk today, I was envious of the sidewalk, and its ability to be all around you.

What's the Matter With People Around Here, Any Ways?

Wed, 26 Jan 2011 13:08:08 -0800

When I was at school in Humboldt County, my girlfriend and I lived in a tiny cabin in Trinidad, California. Next door lived a desperate alcoholic who drank at least a half gallon of cheap whiskey every day.

One day I heard a voice ask “How’s it going?” from somewhere within his cabin. We chatted, and I told him the brakes had failed on my truck nearly causing a crash, and that we suspected a competitor in the firewood business had cut my brake lines. His response was both naive and profound. “What’s the matter with people around here, any ways?”

Since that day, I have asked this question in a variety of settings.

Salvatore Sonny Grosso, a friend of mine, posted this thought for the day on Facebook:

When the spirit dies, so does the soul. Each time we strike, belittle, bully, steal from or disrespect another, a little piece of the Earth’s soul dies. Each time we help, hold, love, respect, encourage and share with another, the spirit is reborn. We hold the World’s Spirit and Soul in our own hands. Together we can save them!

Why do we strike, belittle, bully, steal from and disrespect each other? And what might the world be like if we stopped?

"The world and the universe is an extremely beautiful place, and the more we understand about it the..."

Wed, 26 Jan 2011 12:38:42 -0800

“The world and the universe is an extremely beautiful place, and the more we understand about it the more beautiful does it appear. It is an immensely exciting experience to be born in the world, born in the universe, and look around you and realise that before you die you have the opportunity of understanding an immense amount about that world and about that universe and about life and about why we’re here. We have the opportunity of understanding far, far more than any of our predecessors ever. That is such an exciting possibility, it would be such a shame to blow it and end your life not having understood what there is to understand.”

- Richard Dawkins (via nathanielstuart)

Anger & Grief — Call Today!

Sat, 03 Jul 2010 17:19:00 -0700

Anger & Grief — Call Today!

"Sometimes I recall a smile, a kindness, or a close friend, or I hear a bit of a favorite song, and I..."

Sat, 09 Jan 2010 20:45:09 -0800

“Sometimes I recall a smile, a kindness, or a close friend, or I hear a bit of a favorite song, and I think, for a moment, “I can do this thing.””

Five Airline Safety Rules Not Adopted by T.S.A.

Mon, 28 Dec 2009 16:38:00 -0800

Tighter air travel regulations have been in the news in the wake of the attempted bombing of Northwest Flight 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas Day.

We owe a debt of gratitude to regulators and legislators for preventing the adoption of some additional, and quite onerous, rules. Some of these unimplemented rules include:

Passengers will receive either a first-class upgrade or 20,000 frequent flyer miles for bringing to the attention of the flight crew suspicious activity by a seat-mate. Behaviors that warrant intervention include furtive expressions, the wearing of inappropriate clothing, or ordering from the Sky Mall catalog.
Passengers will be required to speak Swedish and wear their underwear on the outside at all times while on board the aircraft. Since terrorists don’t know Swedish, this will make it easier to spot them, and will make it impossible for them to conceal dangerous items in their underwear.*
The restrooms in the aircraft will be locked at all times. Passengers are urged instead to use restrooms at home or in the airport. In either case, a video record of these activities must be uploaded to the TSA Web site at least one hour prior to departure time.
In the event that the flight crew identifies a potentially threatening situation while airborne, screaming babies will be removed from the main cabin and placed in protective custody in the cargo hold.
Bratz and Barbie branded toys will not be allowed on board the aircraft. (This is less a security precaution than it is a matter of good taste.)

We are fortunate indeed that cooler heads prevailed.

* With apologies to Woody Allen

Vintage Sears Adding Machine Lakes Racer

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 21:43:00 -0700

When I found this vintage Sears adding machine (1970s?) in a local thrift store, I knew that it was a lakes racer trapped in an adding machine’s body. Look at the sweeping Boyd Coddington-esque lines, the two-tone burnt orange finish, the woodie sides. So I took it home and added custom wheels and side pipes from a cherry Mattel Vroom car.

This one of a kind hot rod is for sale for $600. Price does not include dealer prep, documentation fee, title, transfer. Please contact me if you’re interested.

CNN Headline News T-Shirts

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 20:35:00 -0700

I probably shouldn’t be sharing the secret of these cool t-shirts. A couple of weeks ago I went to see Was Not Was, and the keyboard player had a shirt on that said Dummy bomb falls from jet, lands on truck. I did a little research and found that CNN creates t-shirts with interesting headlines, and the network continues to retire headlines and add new ones. Today’s headline sounded like something out of the Weekly World News: Obama sees likeness in hieroglyphic.

Dummy bomb was no longer available, so I got Luggage cart sucked into jet’s engine.

MLK: From a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented one

Mon, 19 Jan 2009 12:47:00 -0800

Earlier this month I was at Macworld, and I spotted the following quote from Martin Luther King, Jr. on a plaque at a fountain in San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center:

“We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”

Dr. King spoke these words on April 4, 1967, in a speech titled “Beyond Vietnam,” delivered to the Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam, at Riverside Church, New York City. Ironic to read this 31 years later, within a few hundred feet of Moscone Center and Macworld, high temple of technology fetish.

I thought Dr. King’s words offered some good advice to those of us in social media, reminding us of the most powerful uses of this technology, and to not forget the social aspect, which is, of course, people.

My favorite holiday gift: MGA Entertainment enjoined from selling Bratz dolls

Thu, 04 Dec 2008 12:32:51 -0800

It’s the end of the line for Bratz dolls with a major courtroom victory by Mattel this week. According to an AP report “Toy giant Mattel Inc., after a four-year legal dispute with MGA Entertainment Inc., touted its win in the case Wednesday after a federal judge banned MGA from making and selling its pouty-lipped and hugely popular Bratz dolls.”

This is the best gift of the season! I despise Bratz dolls. They are emblematic of everything we do to trivialize our girls (don’t recoil at the word, they are girls at this age) and to pimp them out by the time they are seven. I am sick of slutwear, the hip hugger jeans, trashy sequined clothes, belly shirts and other items sold to pre-teen girls in the major chain stores. Retailers are truly shameless.

And Bratz are the worst. They are inconic of the message we send to girls at the earliest possible opportunity: Popularity, appearance, clothes, makeup and money are all that matter. What is inside, the real you, is unimportant.

Marketers know these toys are inappropriate for the girls they are manufactured for and sold to. According to the New Yorker “Marketers now invoke a phenomenon called K.G.O.Y.-Kids Getting Older Younger. (One research report) discusses the challenge of marketing a product like Bratz dolls which many mothers disapprove of.”

Honestly, Barbie is almost as bad. Both products are banned from my house. I want my daughter to grow up being proud of who she is, not what she has.

30th anniversary of Jonestown Massacre - good time to retire a lame cliche

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 21:58:00 -0800

I hate buzz words and cliches passionately, but one of the worst is “drinking the Kool-Aid.” This week marks the 30th anniversary of the event that spawned that idiotic expression, the Jonestown Massacre, in which as many as 900 followers of the cult leader Jim Jones died after being forced to consume Kool-Aid laced with poison.

Tim Reiterman, a journalist who flew to Jonestown, Guyana at the time, and saw Congressman Leo Ryan and several journalists shot dead by Jones’s gunmen, recently said during an interview on NPR that the Kool-Aid cliche was “thoughtless” and “disrespectful.”

The events were tragic enough. Let’s not commemorate them with a joke.

P&G and the tragic unhipness of Google

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 11:54:57 -0800

The recent news that brand stalwart Procter and Gamble and ultra hipster Google have collaborated in a convergence of “old meets new” made me laugh. OK, sure, Google is known for, as the WSJ points out, company-provided scooters in the hallways and for giving engineers lots of room to create great things, like the recently shut down Lively.

But the problem with applied hipness is that once it becomes part of company culture, it ain’t hip anymore, no matter what company adopts it. As Bill Lumbergh said, “Next Friday… is Hawaiian shirt day. So, you know, if you want to, go ahead and wear a Hawaiian shirt and jeans.”

Google is a publicly held company with the same pressures and same behaviors as any other. Watch the movie The Corporation. The premise is that the publicly held company, if it were a person, would be a clinically diagnosed psychopath. Google has not been without its share of psychopathic behavior. (China?)

God love Google. They’ve introduced some killer technology that has changed the way people live and work. Credit due. But let’s not idolize them too much.

The death of “the death of” meme

Mon, 10 Nov 2008 16:05:00 -0800

Once popular and beloved, “the death of” meme, known for driving site traffic and links, was laid to rest this afternoon in a pauper’s grave at My Lady of Perpetual Annoyance Memorial Park. Star of such classics as Die! Press release! Die! Die! Die!, The Death of the Press Release (in wide syndication), and, more recently, the critical hit/box office flop, Twitter, Flickr, Facebook Make Blogs Look So 2004, “the death of” meme had a long and useful life, though, some say, it held on far too long, one of the inevitable byproducts of our ability to prolong living without consideration for the quality of life.

Texas Longhorn Facebooks self off team

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 11:58:26 -0800

According to a piece in today’s Sporting News, “Buck Burnette is your latest example of how not to use Facebook. The backup center for the Texas Longhorns is no longer on the team due to ‘unspecified violations of team rules,’ according to Texas. The real story of how he managed to Facebook his way off the team, however, may be far more specific and interesting than that bland statement. Sometime after the election results were announced, Burnette posted something very, very nasty under his ‘status’ line on Facebook that allegedly involved a racial slur in reference to Obama.”

No wonder MSNBC kept referring to “the Confederacy” on election night. Apparently there are those who think it still exists.

Nearing the end of the hegemony of the self-appointed A-list?

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 12:01:00 -0800

For too long, the so-called A-List has been dominated by bloggers who nominated themselves for inclusion by getting into the game early and subsequently promoting themselves at every opportunity. But people aren’t buying it anymore. They’ve come to realize they can’t form their worldview by confining themselves to the opinions of the same 10 people who have been dominating social media and web 2.0 for three years.

It doesn’t wash to say, “People are voting for the A-list. Look at the number of subscribers, site visits, followers, etc. they have.” It’s a momentum play, and numerically, the A-List may dominate for some time to come but people who want a diverse, more useful, and more informed point-of-view are learning to look outside the handful of P.T. Barnums controlling access to the main tent.

The latest evidence of the rebellion is Sarah Evans’s Unofficial 2008 Top 50 Tweeples to Follow list. I have not written about this list before, because I’m on it, and I didn’t want to appear self serving. There’s also a bit of the Groucho effect (who wants to belong to a club that would have me as a member?).

A friend sent me a link yesterday to Robert Scoble’s 10 Favorite Tech Experts on FriendFeed. The subject line of her email was “congrats,” which caused me to do a double take. Of course I wasn’t on Robert’s Top 10, but it turns out Josh Carrico posted the entire Sarah Evans list as a comment on Robert’s. I’m not sure whether he meant it as a gesture of defiance (I hope so) or just a pointer to some useful information.

I remember when the Evans survey was the topic of conversation on Twitter and Guy Kawasaki responded that the survey was probably “flawed,” which is a riot, since Evans was clear from day one that hers was an informal survey conducted for entertainment purposes as a social networking experiment. By definition, it cannot be “flawed,” because it makes no claims against which it can be deficient.

It’s encouraging that people are beginning to realize, and publicly admit, that there are some very interesting and influential people out there who don’t have half a million Feedburner subscribers. The concept of a handful of people controlling the discussion is a little ironic in the era of democratized communications.

"Our focus should not be on emerging technologies but on emerging cultural practices."

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 03:17:00 -0800

“Our focus should not be on emerging technologies but on emerging cultural practices.”

- Henry Jenkins, Professor of Comparative Media, MIT, and author of Convergence Culture: When Old and New Media Collide.

From a slideshow on Gerd Leonhard’s Music 2.0 site

Fax you? Forget it gramps!

Mon, 03 Nov 2008 18:21:41 -0800

The November 3 Wired features a piece titled Five Useless Gadgets You Should Throw in the Trash Right Now.

Predticably, the piece slams our old friend the fax machine: “Still sending faxes? Hi grandad! The fax was useful when it was the only way to move documents around faster than mailing them. Now it’s pointless.”

I’ll say it’s pointless! And the next time a client/customer says, “fax me a proposal and I’ll get you a P.O.,” just respond, “Screw you, grandpa! Get with the modern age!”

So, it's November

Sun, 02 Nov 2008 18:11:00 -0800

Halloween is behind us and I’ve just finished writing my book. For the first time in six months I have a few minutes respite, so I was compelled to write my first ever, narcissistic, totally not work related, personal recollection. As I understand the early history of blogging, that’s what people used to do on blogs. I’ve always liked Tumblr, and I think it’s ideal for this purpose. It’s simple, fun to update, and with just enough features to fulfill the promise of blogging without making me feel like I’m flying the Millennium Falcon of blogging software.

This has been a nostalgic weekend. On Friday, I introduced my daughter to the Red Balloon, a wonderful 34-minute classic children’s film that is worth sharing with your family. No lasers or aliens. No drugs or swearing. No CG. No cross-promotions or product placements. Just a great children’s story with some important lessons. My daughter was initially upset that the film was subtitled, but I reminded her that balloons don’t say much.

The Red Balloon was re-released last year to mark the 50th anniversary of the film. It’s $10 on Amazon, well worth owning.

Last night we watched the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The movie was OK, but I wanted her to be interested enough to read the books. Really, I want her to grow up in my image. Not really, but there are enough things available for kids today that truly suck, like Bratz, Barbie…so for a parent, it’s a full time job finding replacements.

Any way, this is my tumble log. Not everything here needs to have a point, but I can’t help myself. We had a great weekend reliving my past.