connecting*the*dots

(originally uploaded by mdessem)

Sorry for the bit of drama in my last few posts, but as I stared at the ceiling the other night — not able to sleep because of the sheer amount of stuff going on in my life — I came to the instant realization that I needed to simplify a bit, you know, wrangle my schedule back to being my own.

The crazyness never should have progressed to this point; I know better.

When describing elements of good design to clients, I use the term “reduction,” more often than not to make clear that an additive approach to design — whether it be loading up the interface with features or extreme typographic combinations — is bound to fail, or in the very least, produce a garbled result.

Low and behold, when designer-boy paused to self-reflect the other night — rather, when my brain put me on repeat, caught up in a whirling broken record of commitment-paralysis — I clearly saw that my life was chock full of projects and passions with not many getting the attention they individually deserve.

Especially, my most important passion.

So when I crept out of bed the other night, I attempted to express what I was feeling — that I needed to reduce — without being too wordy. A couple of posts later, my brain felt as though my short-term destiny had been altered by just enough degrees to graciously allow the cycling of rapid thoughts to end and let me drift off to sleep.

Well, based on the comments, email and calls I’ve received from friends, family and distant readers, I figured that I need to provide a bit more insight as to where I am and why blogging has become so much of a drain.

Ridiculous Information Retrieval And Digestion Patterns

I spend an awful lot of time tracking blogs and sites of interest — upwards of 110 to 130 feeds at any given time — covering numerous industries, local and world politics, friends around the globe, etc. Many of my posts over the last six-months have amounted to short quotes from people talking about issues that I find interesting; I used the WP asides feature to drop these quick thoughts (or “pointers”) as an effort to push information out quickly, instead of sitting on it to form a larger essay post down the line. That was a smart solution to upping my output and reducing post paralysis, but I quickly became the idiot who’s addicted to checking Bloglines every 15 minutes for more material.

After pausing from blogging for just a few days, I’ve been able to treat Bloglines like my backup email account — checking once in the morning and once in the evening. I don’t know if it’ll last, but so far so good.

Forgetting Why I Blog

I’ve been writing on the web, one way or another, since 1997. Up until June of 2005, I never even glanced at web analytics — my personal state of mind was always my indicator of happiness or success. Shit, I’ve changed my domain name so many times in the past to reflect personal shifts in mood or focus (digitalportfolio, squareone, apperceptive), I never even paused to consider that my writing/poetry/blogging was being read by anyone with any degree of consistency. Well, in this age of Mint, Feedburner, Technorati, etc., I’ve come to understand that I am being read.

I rather enjoy the benefits of having a readership — hearing from old friends and meeting new ones through conversations found in comment threads, trackback pings, industry conferences or local meetups — but not when content production begins to replace blogging at my pace. Up until last week, I thought I had been publishing at my own pace, even though I knew that I was spending way too much time in the blogging process. After a bit of self-reflection, I’m not so sure that’s the case.

Moving Forward

My life is currently chock full of responsibility and not enough time in the day. I’m working with five different clients on a variety of projects, building my first non-profit and design consultancy, living with the love of my life and trying to keep up with my little bro back up in Jersey. Not one of them has been receiving enough attention from me. Throw in my friends & family and trying to get back in shape, and, well, I think you’re starting to feel me. Blogging is important, but it can’t be my central focus.

So where do I take my blogging from here?

• My Technorati profile reads: connecting*the*dots attempts to frame the convergence of political, technological and cultural memes through pointed essays and captured moments of communication across the web. It’s time to change up the editorial premise and make it much more geared towards my life. I’ll probably remove the name of the blog all together at some point.
• I’m going back to dropping poetry and writing longer essays when the mood strikes — getting away from keeping up with an intra-day, consecutive posting streak.
• John Ford and I are working on developing a collaborative blog project at dotmatrixproject.com. I’ll probably use this spot as the publishing interface for those design/tech posts, as John is working on code to scrape dotmatrixproject tagged posts from a universe of indexed sites and add them to dotmatrixproject as authored posts.
• I’ll continue to post perspective on items that outrage or move me — whether it be in the form of a video, a pointer, or an essay — but I’m going to pick my spots moving forward. Feel free to keep sending me items of interest; the random email pointers I’ve received from readers over the last year has made blogging extremely rewarding

So yeah, that’s the plan more or less; less posts, but with more personal and professional meaning and published on my schedule.

I do hope that you’ll keep your subscription as I attempt this transition. While I won’t be presenting as much info anymore, I’d like to believe that what I do publish will be worth the wait.

We’ll see.

(originally uploaded by Gymkata)

Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King

For the back story, hit up Tuttle SVC.

UPDATE: It seems as though Google has closed the GoogleBomb loophole in their algorithm. What now?

(originally uploaded by Nomine UK)

Last Sunday, Ndesanjo, Andy and I attended an event over at A&T, which we thought was a discussion about the digital divide in the African-American community. Well, it turned out to be a much broader conversation — one steeped in collaborative progression towards building stronger community.

What we stumbled upon was The Dean’s Book Club, and this particular meeting was to discuss the ten covenants found in Tavis Smiley’s book, The Covenant With Black America.

As we attempted to get our bearings straight — not quite understanding the format of the discussion — Will Hall approached us and pointed out that his table (one of eight) was the setting digital divide discussion. Once the room filled out and Sharon Hoard, Dr. Ioney James and Dean Lelia Vickers gave their opening remarks about the book and the importance of Smiley’s covenants to the African-American community, each table turned inwards and began discussing the underlying concepts behind a particular covenant.

Will Hall moderating the digital divide conversation

While the discussion was centered on Smiley’s perspective of how the digital divide affects African-Americans, each person at the table had a unique perspective to share.

Barbara Davis of HandyCapable, spoke about how computers have changed the lives of disabled individuals — specifically by providing them with the opportunity to gain skills be repairing computers themselves. She also told the story of how a local woman — grandmother and matriarch of her family — received a computer with an internet connection and soon became the connectivity and application hub for her entire family.

To the right of me sat a number of students and teachers who provided a perspective about technology in the university setting; how it needed to become more infused in the curriculum across all of the schools at A&T in order to improve computer literacy.

Student participation was the centerpiece of the evening

When I mentioned the concept of blogging and how it’s already empowered so many local voices in Greensboro, especially through our local aggregator, the kids (as well as the adults) stared back with blank expressions on their faces — knowing nothing of either blogging or Greensboro101.com.

Living in a town nicknamed Blogsboro, that reaction was somewhat disappointing, but not completely unexpected. It would be foolish to think that all of Greensboro is tracking the latest personal publishing developments, especially when sitting at a table discussing the digital divide. Our blogging community is nowhere close to being representative of the entire community.

Such an obvious divide in local, amplified voices is the primary reason I began working on The People, Yes in the first place. With this reaction as impetus, I’m beginning to consider avenues for expanding our sub-community focus beyond the homeless — post-launch of course.

But I digress… back to the discussion at hand.

Professor and student reading from The Covenant With Black America

Another perspective regarding technology in the African-American community emerged from the two professors at the table. Both men seemed to focus more on the negative aspects of today’s youth, stressing that the desire for excellence with the youth isn’t consistent with the rest of society, which affects the ability to compete for advancement in society. One professor went as far as to blame mainstream media — violent video games, music, etc. — for the degradation of African American youths.

Man, I wish we had more time to explore that one.

Ndesanjo attempted to deal with the issue, as he touched upon his work at the Boys and Girls Club, expressing the importance of teaching the youth to view the web as an opportunity to participate in an upload culture by creating media — even their own games — for distribution. It was a poignant message, but I don’t think it quite stuck as the conversation quickly moved to hit the major points of Smiley’s covenant before our student representative reported our discussion back to the entire room.

As we moved from the digital divide conversation into the presentations of the various covenant discussions, I began to get a sense of how this particular community of professionals, educators and students approached building strong, supportive, humane community. Tavis Smiley might have set the framework in motion, but the pragmatism, compassion and righteousness of the participants in the room exposed me to yet another dynamic aspect of Greensboro community.

I’m telling you, there’s gold in these yonder hills; nuggets of community I’ve yet to experience living elsewhere.

Tonight @ 7pm in Congdon Hall, Room 138 at High Point University (Directions), John Ford and myself will be rapping about this little activity called blogging.

If you’ve heard about it before, but don’t know how blogging can assist you as a small business owner, an activist, a writer, etc., come on down and get both the back-story and the 411 on how to publish to the internet.

And if you’re already a blogger, well, come on down and live-blog our presentation!

Have they no shame! Heh…

Sage Lewis, if you ever find yourself in Greensboro, NC, feel free to drop me a line. I’d dig having a beer with you, bro’.

Wired News
Gannett to Crowdsource News
By Jeff Howe

[…]

According to internal documents provided to Wired News and interviews with key executives, Gannett, the publisher of USA Today as well as 90 other American daily newspapers, will begin crowdsourcing many of its newsgathering functions. Starting Friday, Gannett newsrooms were rechristened “information centers,” and instead of being organized into separate metro, state or sports departments, staff will now work within one of seven desks with names like “data,” “digital” and “community conversation.”

The initiative emphasizes four goals: Prioritize local news over national news; publish more user-generated content; become 24-7 news operations, in which the newspapers do less and the websites do much more; and finally, use crowdsourcing methods to put readers to work as watchdogs, whistle-blowers and researchers in large, investigative features.

“This is a huge restructuring for us,” said Michael Maness, the VP for strategic planning of news and one of the chief architects of the project. According to an e-mail sent Thursday to Gannett news staff by CEO Craig Dubow, the restructuring has been tested in 11 locations throughout the United States, but will be in place throughout all of Gannett’s newspapers by May. “Implementing the (Information) Center quickly is essential. Our industry is changing in ways that create great opportunity for Gannett.”

[…]

Well, it looks like Jay Rosen’s NewAssignment.net isn’t as much R&D as he and many others have thought.

Sure, Jay will have tons more room to explore the creation of a collaborative news model with value for the reader, the participants and the domain alike, but with this news from Gannett, it’s obvious that the owners of these newspapers are finally getting that change is an eventuality.

My question: Is their approach to CrowdSourcing as pure as Jay’s?

As Jay tells it, NewAssignment will evolve over time (without the pressures of a bottom line, as it’s root is based in academia), discovering and iterating different methods of collaboration with citizens who are willing to put time and effort into a story because it absolutely concerns them from either a personal or community perspective.

No matter how much Gannett, the organization, talks that talk, their institutional and primary shareholders will not allow them to walk that exact walk. This is not an egalitarian shift in operating procedures; this is a shift based purely on industry competition and the potential loss of capital.

The motivations of editors and journalists within these organizations align much more with the drivers behind NewAssignment, but the bottom line for their careers is that they are at the mercy of the business drivers of the Gannetts of the world. So when an organization decides to run in this direction, I can only imagine the types of conversations to be found at the water-cooler.

The Future Of CrowdSourcing

My net takeaway of this announcement from Gannett is positive, but only in as much as their organizational methodology doesn’t attempt to leverage the free output of people as a mechanism for reaching a bottom-line. For if people’s creativity, perspectives and thesis’ are tapped into — beyond the aforementioned proactive participation of watchdogging, whistle-blowing and researching — then we’re heading down a path that isn’t progressive; it’s a reversion to the underpinnings of the industrial revolution and techniques of mass production, only now within the information age.

This isn’t an easy subject to take a position because technology isn’t a static delivery platform. Take the search industry as an example:

When a search engine (corporation) indexes billions of web pages (other people’s work) and returns search results with advertising affixed, that search engine is essentially CrowdSourcing to establish their bottom-line. Now, because the vast majority of people and organizations whose web sites, blogs, services, applications, etc. receive a huge benefit of consistent exposure from such an arrangement, the search industry is considered to be a benefit rather than exploitation.

But a particular news organization does not fall into the same sphere as a search engine.

A search engine indexes everything, from the base domain to the most granular content found within. If/when news organizations venture beyond working the wisdom of the crowd in a participatory fashion, and begin to algorithmically tap into the meta-data of external amateur output — whether it be blog posts, video, photography, podcasts, etc. — the fine line between collaboration and exploitation will be crossed in order to impact a bottom-line.

Other people, afar and local, are thinking about these issues as well:

• Chris Messina is a tireless advocate for community and open-source, so his perspective on CrowdSourcing goes even deeper into the fundamental drivers of our capitalistic society. This interview is an interesting conversation along these lines.
• Local blogger, The Shu, posted his meandering thoughts along the lines of this very same issue early last year — particular to the announcement that the Greensboro News & Record planned on creating a “Town Square” with the participation of local bloggers — and was painted by journalists and many local bloggers in the comment thread as being everything but a conspiracy theorist.

In numerous circles, the term information age is considered synonymous with the term information revolution, but that association is tenuous at best in my mind.

Are we going to let the revolutionary aspects of technology explicitly serve the capital masters of the world, turning our personal expertise, opinions and creativity into the equivalent of a virtual assembly line of mass media production?

I truly hope not.

Dear Forward-Thinking Suits,

Thanks so much for pulling all of the Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert clips off of YouTube. You’ve now rendered a good number of my posts useless — posts that were marketing your shows for free. That’s right, you had thousands of fans, like me, pointing to and contextualizing clips from their blogs, generating millions of page views and legions of new viewers and you killed it because they weren’t your page views.

So dumb.

Let me ask you people a simple question: How much money do you pump into your marketing department annually? I mean, what’s your budget for marketing executives, their minions and external network marketing? Can’t you recognize that whatever percentage you had set aside for TDS and TCS brand awareness (not specific show promos, just awareness campaigns) was becoming a waste of money with the YouTube fans doing our thing? We were doing your jobs for free and doing it better than you ever could have done it yourself!

Come to think of it, maybe you did understand that angle before acting…

See, the way that I view this is that from an organizational standpoint, this type of viral marketing is a perfect opportunity to cut back on traditional marketing budgets and let the web do what the web does. But then again, organizations are made up of people and people need to provide value in order to get paid by the organization.

V.P. Johnson can’t keep that corner office if he has legions of fans doing his work for him at a price that puts him out on the street. So build that wall! Keep them out of our stuff! Send them back to Mexico… er… hm.

Congratulations, again, Comedy Central executives. You’ve proven yourself to be no more forward-thinking than this administration that your talent rails on each week. Someday, your network bosses will understand what this move did to your fan-base, but probably not until a competitor network — one that won’t collude with the rest of the big boys — embraces the web and the people that put food on your plates.

Colbert and Stewart are still my boys, but my passion for your product has dropped immeasurably.

And that’s The Word.

UPDATE: Mark Glaser (MediaShift) updated his open letter to Stephen Colbert with a report that lawyers from Comedy Central are cherry-picking the clips they want taken down from YouTube, possibly in a hardball negotiating move to tweak Google and their new acquisition.

So not all clips have come down. That’s good news. How Comedy Central decides to proceed from here, though, is key.

If they want to negotiate the creation of a channel on YouTube for CC distributed shows and all discrete segments of shows, that move will serve the desires of many CC fans, especially bloggers. The amount of ad revenue they’ll make on viral replays at this point in time pales in comparison to advertising revenue from the TV broadcast itself, but tacking on an ad to the end of a video (as Revver has done with zeFrank) works well for all parties involved.

This could work out for everyone if CC doesn’t get greedy and:

• attempt to add commercials within segments and shows, which are essentially already commercials (running across YouTube and the decentralized web) for their regularly scheduled programs on TV
• police people who upload their own segment edits, instead of chalking up the “lost revenue” as a marketing expenditure.

If Comedy Central can avoid those old media trappings, they just might come out of this as new media players.

(originally uploaded by BombDog)