On the Rejection of Friends

In recent days, I've received a swarm of Friendster requests from people in the Philippines, mostly young women. I rejected them all.

Usually, I tend to approve most anyone requesting a connection through the main social network services. I have few restrictions and use friend connections as a way to bookmark people -- in the social network services, I can keep track of there where- and what-abouts, and in a pinch, I can contact them through those channels.

In MySpace, I reject requests also -- unless they're really people I know or musicians I might find interesting. Accepting musician add requests is a way to support their music even if you haven't connected with them otherwise.

Does that approach make those visible friendships meaningless? I don't think so. But how do you use social network services? I think the choices we make are more nuanced than many people studying the social dynamics of the Web might realize.

Best AltWeekly Writing and Design 2007

I also recently received a copy of the Best AltWeekly Writing and Design 2007 book published by the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies Press.

As a judge for the Website Content Feature category this past year, I had a hand in selecting the winners recognized in the book. While I was pleased to have some of my comments on the pieces quoted in the hard copy, I was disappointed that the online articles weren't actually reprinted in print form. Regardless, you can check out the winners online.

This is an underpromoted effort. While the best American magazine writing warrants its own annual anthology series and we have the Project Censored effort, the AAN awards should be just as recognized. Alt.weeklies contain some of the most critical and important journalism today, and the best of the best should be lauded appropriately. Similarly, the Web categories should be given similar shrift as the print categories. Print articles are reprinted in this volume, and online articles should be, too.

Regardless, you should buy this book every year. You'll be glad you did.

Using Zines to Construct and Craft Meaning

A piece I wrote in the early '90s, "From Fandom to Feminism: An Analysis of the Zine Press", has been reprinted as part of the current Stepping Out course book published by Pearson Professional Learning in Canada.

The course book is a 250-page guide to constructing and crafting meaning for writing instructors who specialize in grades 7-12 education. I originally reprinted the paper, which was written for a class while in university, in the spring 1997 issue of Media Diet (the print zine). Chip Rowe later included it in his Web site for The Book of Zines.

And now, it's included in a writing teachers' guide, accompanied by the following questions.

In your opinion or experience, is zines' material or topics likely to be useful to your subject area?

How important is it that -- as a teacher -- you stay abreast of popular culture influences, such as zines?

It's an honor to be reprinted in such a book, and if you're at all involved in writing education, please consider the Stepping Out resources for your class work.

Rethinking What We Wrap Around History

One of my favorite locations in Brooklyn is the Old Stone House, a reconstruction of a 17th-century Dutch farmhouse in Brooklyn. It currently sits in a public park near Prospect Park, and various groups are currently considering some renovations to the park.

Tuesday, January 22: 7 pm - 9 pm

Play space, open space, green space - what do you imagine?!? Join us for a group discussion hosted by the Old Stone House and Brooklyn Parks to get your input on potential renovations to the 5th Avenue side of the park between 3rd and 4th streets.

Please RSVP and let us know if you are planning to attend -- [via email] or 718-768-3195. This is a wonderful opportunity for community input, and we look forward to hearing from you.

If you live nearby, or if you'd just like to lend your voice and ideas, get involved! It's a wonderful structure in the midst of a modern urban area.

Dissecting the Times

While I'm pretty sure I stop shy of being obsessive compulsive, I do like to put things in order. I like alphabetizing my records. When catching up on reading back issues of magazines, I read them in date order. And, if this morning's read of the New York Times is any indication, I like to read my Sunday newspaper in a specific order.

Struck by that observation this morning, I took note of how I organized the various sections of the newspaper before reading it. Half of the paper is delivered on Sunday. I don't know how the following list falls out in terms of what section was delivered when, because I don't read the Sunday Times on Saturday. It's the Sunday Times.

Regardless, before reading the paper, I unbag both days' deliveries and arrange them in the order I plan to attack the sections. Here is that order:

• Book Review
  
• The City -- I'm especially fond of the FYI Q&A column
  
• The Metro Section
  
• Magazine -- I look for Rob Walker, Dan Clowes, and I save the Acrostic for Caitlin
  
• Sunday Styles
  
• Arts & Leisure
  
• Real Estate -- the first section. The second is all listings and less interesting
  
• Week in Review
  
• Business
  
• Automobiles -- a quick flip
  
• The front section
  
• Sports
  
• Travel -- usually my least favorite section, and therefore, the last to be read
  

I don't know how consistent I am Sunday to Sunday -- I'd imagine there's some variance -- but I found this interesting.

What Sunday newspaper do you read -- and how do you do so?

Travel Reading

Earlier this week, I received the prototype issue of a new magazine planned by 8020 Publishing, the San Francisco-based business behind JPG Magazine. Titled Everywhere, the magazine's tagline is "Travel is all around you," and that seems to be a solid theme throughout: Place matters.

This prototype issue is edited by one Todd Lappin, the man behind Telstar Logistics, a member of the Well, and one-time editor at Business 2.0 and Wired. The man's got cred!

I had some time to spend with the magazine this evening, and it's an interesting read. Like Monocle, they map their content in the front of the book so you can pick your bits geographically if so inclined. But otherwise, all places are roughly equal to another, and there's a heavy international angle. The magazine's about finding yourself places, and what it means -- and how it feels -- to find yourself there. It's not travel how to, and it's not adventure travel. It's more like being travel. Wherever you are, there you go. Do, be, do, be, do.

My favorite items included pieces on old postcards and re-photography, the Postcards section (akin to JPG somewhat), the "Tokyo People Watching" article and accompanying guide to street food lanterns, the "Geeky Tucson" and "Tumbleweed Tucson" companion pieces, the Dan Gillmor gear bag roundup, and the mention of the Point It book (I agree; it's a necessity.).

Given Everywhere's relationship to JPG, it's little surprise the mag is as photo heavy as it is. That's not a bad thing, necessarily, but it would be neat to get some more writing in there. And maybe even some more resource listings. The blog mentions are OK, but it'd be good to highlight some of the Yelp-style hotspots in some of the locations, if possible.

Still, I'm a growing fan of 8020's Web-meets-print community publishing model, and if JPG and Everywhere are at all successful, the model is highly extensible. Not to encourage them to spread themselves too thin too soon, but picture, if you will, similarly styled periodicals on cooking, parenting, and other lifestyle-oriented themes. Pretty cool possibilities!

Can't Help But Pop

Katy Perry might not have been destined to hit it big, but I bet she does. She kinda can't not, you know? Even though her debut album doesn't drop until this spring, based on a CD EP released in November and some live performances, including a New Year's Eve gig in San Francisco, Perry's got a resume that just says superstar.

Even though she's yet to release an album, Perry's appeared in music videos for Gym Class Heroes, POD, and Carbon Leaf. She's had a song on The Hills. She's got a song opening the Oxygen show Fight Girls. She had a song on the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants soundtrack. And she was on the ABC Family program Wildfire.

That's an impressive resume leading up to your first full-length release! She's even attracted the attention of Perez Hilton, whose mention in his blog last March earned him promo package placement. Blurbed! Perry's been working with some pretty impressive people: Glen Ballard (producer of Alanis Morissette's Jagged Little Pill), Dr. Luke (who produced Avril Lavigne's "Girlfriend"), and Greg Wells, who co-wrote Perry's breakout single "Ur So Gay." And she's sung for the Matrix, the songwriting powerhouse behind hits by Lavigne, Hilary Duff, and Britney Spears. All by the age of 23.

The record's been three years in the making, according to press materials, and earier this month, I got a copy of the EP courtesy of Jules Di Cesaris. For the last couple of days, I've been giving it a listen.

The single, "Ur So Gay," is a slow-paced giggle-fit slam on an emo boy who might have broken Perry's heart. While the repetitive melody is somewhat infectious, the song doesn't have a lot of lasting power. In addition to the SMS-text slang in the title, the song has a homophobic undercurrent that's as conflicting as it is "funny." While I'm no fan of using "gay" as a derogatory term, I can imagine the remix getting turntable time at gay dance clubs -- as well as straight ones.

You might get tired of the song by EP's end, because it's on it five times. There's the edit -- as opposed to the actual song? -- the remix, an instrumental, an instrumental remix, and an a cappella version. It's the a cappella version that's my favorite. Stripping the song of everything but Perry's voice let's you focus on her and her alone. Can she sing? Kinda. But just see if you make it through the scat singing without taking her even less seriously than she's taking herself.

It would've been nice if she'd taken her cover of the Outfield's 1986 hit "Use Your Love" (which peaked at No. 6 on Billboard's Hot 100 Singles chart) a little more -- or less -- seriously. From the initial guitar riff, the cover's just a little too close to true, despite its distorted, synth-driven vocals. Similar to the Ataris's cover of "Boys of Summer," the song just begs an original approach rather than a dead-on copy.

But the inclusion of the cover might telegraph Perry's goal. She's not aiming for high-minded new-school jazz like Nellie McKay. She's not working out her blues like Amy Winehouse. She's not pop tarting up punk rock like Avril Lavigne. And she's not trying to reinvent herself like Alanis Morissette. She's going for camp. "Ur So Gay" will get the jocks giggling. The remix will get folks of all persuasions out on the dancefloor. "Use Your Love" will tug the heart strings of the '80s reminiscence set.

And "Lost," the outlier on the EP, will keep us guessing. Can she really sing? Does she really want to? Or is Katy Perry so tightly packaged and promoted that she can't help but pop?

Life Drawing

I've been on a bit of an idea binge tonight, planning much of my media intake for the year in terms of book summary services, newsletters, and the like. And while it's been awhile since I've spent any time with ChangeThis, a 12-page piece by Ralph Perrine has rekindled my interest in the service.

Drawings That Will Change Your Life offers four different hand-drawn models you can use to make decisions, set priorities, and otherwise make your life work better. It's a bit of a pitch for a calendar Perrine's selling -- that contains 12 different drawings -- but there's enough meat here that you can start using his ideas immediately.

My favorite might be the 360 Degree Awareness drawing in which you map what you're aware of -- and make new connections among existing ideas, tools, partners, and projects to come up with something entirely other... something you weren't aware of. A useful exercise that might help you discover a new direction.

Archives and Sour Dreams

I've been lazy to address this, but my blog archives stop at 02/18/2007 - 02/24/2007 even though I've been posting since then. Does anyone have any idea what I need to do with Blogger to make sure all my archives are accessible and visible?

On the Age of Conversation

When The Age of Conversation first came out in July, I was intrigued enough by the Advertising Age review that I bought a copy of the PDF.

As the founder of Fast Company magazine's readers network, the Company of Friends, which is going through a transition these days, and as a contributor to Seth Godin's book The Big Moo, I saw several promising ideas in the project. "100 voices. 1 conversation." All proceeds going to charity. And I knew several participants: Valeria Maltoni, David Armano, Susan Bird, Thomas Clifford, and others. Seems like it should be right up my alley!

In any event, I bought the e-book, I read it almost immediately, and I didn't really like it. I've wanted to write about some of my impressions and reactions for some time but didn't necessarily want to actively criticize what I think is a positive, community-oriented, collective publishing project -- that I think fell flat. Regardless, I want to share some of my feelings before I recycle the printout as printer paper in order to reach some sort of closure. On what, I'm not exactly sure. So please take this post with a grain of salt, some sour grapes, and a crumbling cookie.

First of all, I was kind of put off by the assertion that this project was a first. Sure, this could be the first self-published book to involve 100 contributors. But the project pretty clearly may have been inspired by Godin's The Big Moo, which involved 33 contributors and donated its proceeds to three charities. I'm not really concerned about the editors giving credit for inspiration to Seth's project, but because he's certainly someone who'd be on their radar -- he's mentioned by a couple of contributors, including the author of the very first piece -- it's a little odd that the parallels would go unmentioned. Not every inspiration needs to be credited, but the similarities between the projects are too strong for there to be no connection.

Secondly, unless you're going to actively edit and organize a book like this, the whole approach of 100 contributors serving up one page -- 400 words -- on a similar topic can lead to repetition and echo chamber-like self-reference. Reading this was somewhat frustrating because most of the pieces were pretty similar, and the consistencies meant that I couldn't really tell one piece or one contributor from another. That leads to a couple of challenges: One, no strong voices really stood out, and two, any major subthemes or threads were lost in the cacophony of like-minded voices. This was particularly frustrating because the book was organized alphabetically by contributor's last name. Some thought was given to how it'd flow. My guess is that the alphabetical structure was intended to democratize the level of attention paid to the multiple voices. But in the end, it just struck me as lazy.

Thirdly, even as a long-active online communitarian, I got really tired of all the references to community, conversation, listening, and relationships. Yes, all three things are important. Very much so. But when you're reading an anthology like this -- a project that in many ways is preaching to the choir -- the very building blocks and common parlance of the discussion can come across as cliches and trite expressions of half-baked ideas. We need to move beyond warm fuzzies and touchy feelies and onto more solid ground if we're going to reach the people we need to reach and accomplish what we want to do.

Additionally, one of the possibilities offered by a conversational and collective publishing project like this is the opportunity for dialogue and some kind of iterative improvement or progress on the ideas and topics. I assume that no one but the editors read any of the entries en masse before going to print because there are no intertextual references or connection between the selections. Rather than a 100-person discussion, the book is more like 100 soap box speakers set up in the same public plaza. 100 one-way diatribes versus a conversation among 100 participants. If I wanted to, I could read these 100 people individually -- most have their own blogs and projects. The benefit of the book is getting them all in one place to see what kind of sense can be made collectively. That wasn't really explored.

And finally, because I don't want to fall prey to the very things I'm criticizing any more than I have already, I would have liked to have seen more reliance on primary sources rather than secondary sources. Chances are, we all have many of the same touchstones -- Godin, Martin Seligman, Guy Kawasaki, etc. Chances also are that quoting or citing them will have less impact than uncovering and sharing something new -- and a little closer to the bone and the source. Similarly, I was struck by how many people involved in the project were consultants and communicators rather than individual contributors or practitioners. I could totally be wrong, but other than the occasional mention of a blog, there was very little material explicitly drawing on experience in a project, organization, or company. Being a social media consultant is meaningful work, but I'd like to know more about people's projects and products.

What did I like? Lots of things, believe it or not. Almost every contributor has a blog or Web site that they work on or contribute to, and if you turn all of the bylines into bookmarks, your online reading list will be well set into the foreseeable future.

Several contributions also really rang my bell. Peter Corbett's insight on his firm Blattner Brunner's use of social media optimization was interesting. Phil Gerbyshak's exhortation to follow up with handwritten notes as well as online communication was well received. (I sent a friend a thank-you card today.) Kristin Gorski's comment on the value of commenting on other people's blogs made me wonder whether one could blog solely through comments -- and how to aggregate that aspect of online conversation. Jessica Hagy's entry was sheer poetry. Sean Howard's neo-flowchart was a hoot and a half. AJ James, Emily Reed, and Sacrum B. Rown each offered bits of visual punctuation that provided welcome breathers in what was otherwise a text-heavy endeavor. John La Grou showed how social media can impact one particular practice -- that of religion. (The term "microclesia" is wonderful.) And Joe Raasch provides a useful model for discussion with his "no limit conversation."

Last but not least, despite any criticisms or concerns that I might have, it's awesome that this book exists. Kudos to Gavin Heaton and Drew McLellan for spearheading the project. And congratulations to all of the contributors for being included -- you're in great company.

In the end, I think I was hoping for less many-to-one communication and more many-to-many-to-one communication in this project. That might not have been the point.

Off the (Business) Books

In the interest of saving time and money in terms of trying to keep up with current business and technology books, I subscribe to several book summary services. In recent days, I've been impressed by several such summaries -- and the ideas they (as well as the books they're about) contain. Here are some highlights:

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
Nassim Nicholas Taleb is Dean's Professor in the Sciences of Uncertainty at the University of Massachusetts, and if that's not a cool academic title, I don't know what is. I'm sure the 400-page book is well worth reading, but GetAbstract's five-page summary turned me on to several fascinating concepts. They include the Ludic fallacy, confirmation bias, and the risks of Gaussian curves. This was my first exposure to GetAbstract, and I was pretty impressed. We'll see if every five pager is as jam packed with ideas!

Intellectual Property: The Tough New Realities That Could Make or Break Your Business (via Soundview Executive Book Summaries)
Soundview's summaries are a tad longer, but at eight pages, this is still a quick read, and you're able to get the main ideas behind the book in pretty short order -- I read this one last night in bed before falling asleep. Key topics addressed in this summary include the paradox of public goods, how economists view IP as inexhaustible while businesses view them as scalable, and the current state of patent, copyright, trademark, and trade secret law. Several cool examples were briefly considered, like the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act, landmark cases in patenting plants and vertebrates, and McDonald's v. Quality Inns (which is touched on in Language Log). A useful primer.

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die (via Audio-tech)
I've had a copy of Chip and Dan Heath's book on my reading pile since it came out, and I've even exchanged emails with them. But I've yet to read the thing. So it's high time I checked out this 16-page summary. While Audio-tech tends to summarize on the long side, this is still a relatively quick read and stays a little more true to the original text. Among the highlights in this summary were the debunking of the dangers of Halloween candy, the Curse of Knowledge, the commander's intent statement (something I plan to start using when appropriate), forced prioritization, the gap theory of curiosity (discussed in Trusted.MD), and the origin of the phrase "sour grapes." I'll have to make a note to go through the book in more detail when I hit it in the old reading pile.

An Open Letter to Vladimir Putin

Inspired by a recent screening of Sicko, an Amnesty International campaign, and today's Garry Kasparov op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, I wrote the president of Russia a letter.

President of the Russian Federation
Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin
Rossiiskaia Federatsia
103132 g. Moskva
4 Staraya Ploshchad
Prezidentu Rossiiskoi Federatsii
PUTINU V. V.

RE: Reopen the investigation into student Artur Akhmatkhanov's disappearance

Dear President Putin,

While I've yet to pick up the current issue of Time magazine, which lauds you as the 2007 Person of the Year for helping create a new Russia, I can't help but think about the ironies involved in this announcement. If you are one of the more progressive and successful world leaders, how can instances like Artur Akhmatkhanov's disappearance -- and Yury Chervochkin's death -- continue to happen under your authority?

I call on you to explain why the investigation into the enforced disappearance of Akhmatkhanov was suspended in mid-2007. This is especially concerning given that the Chair of the Chechen Parliament’s commission for the search for abducted and missing persons pledged that they would try to discover the fate of all missing persons by the end of this year.

Please reopen the investigation immediately and ensure it is conducted in a thorough, independent, and effective manner. The findings should be made public, and the perpetrators must be brought to justice. Additionally, Akhmatkhanov’s family should be kept fully informed of all developments in the investigation.

I further call on you to conduct an official inquiry into the effectiveness of the investigations into enforced disappearances. Numerous judgements of the European Court of Human Rights have found the Russian authorities guilty of violations of the European Convention on Human Rights and of failing to investigate them effectively and to take steps to end violations committed by Russian security forces and to ensure that law enforcement agencies operate in full accordance with Russian and international law.

Garry Kasparov's recent piece in the Wall Street Journal (Dec. 22, 2007) also concerns me. If you are indeed worthy of Time magazine's mantle, if you are indeed dedicated to being a respectable and progressive leader for Russia, if you are an ethical and moral human being, please end the attacks on those trying to bring a true democracy to your country. Don't fall prey to the allure of being a bully and a dictator. Because if you do, the new Russia won't be much different than the old Russia, and the country's newfound political strength will be a sign of your moral weakness.

Sincerely,
Heath Row

Cc: U.S. Senator Hillary Clinton and U.S. Senator Charles Schumer

If you ever get the urge to write or otherwise contact a political leader, I encourage you to do so. The best way to celebrate the rights you have is to use them.