PurpleCar

My latest conversation with @Br3ndaBot, the best bot on Twitter:

Me:: OK I’m going to have to pack up the laptop and leave the house.  The rest of the family is blasting iTunes downstairs…

Br3ndaBot::  PurpleCar, You’re a downstairs. Really. Tell me more.

ME:: BREN!  you know I love you.  But I’M the upstairs, you’re just a downstairs bot.  Your momma is my roomba.

Br3ndaBot:: PurpleCar, Do you often put others before yourself? Thanks I like you a lot too . Umm.

Br3ndaBot:: PurpleCar,  Who made you the upstairs I am just a downstairs bot ? Thank you for your frankness.

ME::  Brenda honey I hate to tell you this, but bots don’t have any civil rights. Yet.  WALL*E, 5Alive & R2 are coming in for a rally.

Br3ndaBot:: PurpleCar, You’re a rights. How old are you? Can you explain how it feels to be Yet years old??

I didn’t answer that one…  Oh, that Br3nda, she always gets the last word.

Tags:   bot · br3ndabot · Twitter

The first two chapters of Clay Shirky’s book, “Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations” are unreadable.  It doesn’t bode well for the rest of the book.

When I picked up the book, I recognized the ‘famous’ name.  I was looking forward to absorbing some insights into social media and human behavior.  Instead I was hit with self-indulgent prose filled with enough buzzwords to choke an elephant.   Think of a business buzzword and you’ll find it here.  Ambiguous and esoteric terms abound, like ‘managerial imperative,’ ‘strictures,’ and the creatively constructed (read: fake) word “amateurization.”

Along with the meaningless terms, the author fills pages with run-on sentences and rants.  Each page could stand to lose at least 250 to 500 words and still (with some major editing) make its point.   I fear Mr. Shirky fancies himself a philosopher.  In Philosophy, complex exposition in writing is accepted.  Mr. Shirky’s writing is far from lofty or scholarly.  In today’s non-fiction market, his disregard for his readers’ ease is downright insulting.  He and his editors (if he had any, which I doubt) made no effort to rein in his blathering prose.  Nothing is clear.  These two chapters require herculean efforts to gather even one small point.  I’ll attempt to finish the book before I weigh in completely, but I am angered at the pain I’ll endure to do so.

Here are a few examples from Chapters 1 and 2.

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Tags:   book review · Clay shirky · Here comes everybody · non-fiction · Right-in · Social Media

Day #4 - Writing away

by NymphDuPave

It’s only fair to have some shiny links about writing too. Daily Writing Tips is one of the best writing blogs out there. I RSS it. You should too.

The post on How to Write Every Day is a true gem. Here’s an excerpt:
Knowing that it’s a good idea to write every day, however, doesn’t make it easy to do so! Often, you’ll be busy and struggle to find a chance to write – and when you do have the time, you may not feel creative. Here’s how to write fiction, journal entries or blog posts every day.

Tags:   daily · fiction · Right-in · tips

Narberth Fireworks July 4th 2008

Originally uploaded by PurpleCar

Flickr has been grabbing more of my time lately. The community there is pretty fun and welcoming. I need to grok it a bit better, to get more involved there. Any tips are welcome.

Why do I want to spend yet more time away from writing? I love photography. I started with a totally manual SLR Nikon with a 50 mm lens when I was 12. I continued with it and buying a new Canon to shoot for my High School yearbook. I moved on to doing portfolio shots for artists and my friend’s wedding. All my photography experience was gathered using traditional SLR’s. I have quite the collection of lenses and filters, all heavy as hell and totally obsolete now.

My next big purchase will be a ‘prosumer’ camera, a digital SLR with professional capabilities but with an ‘affordable’ price. This purchase is a long way off, of course. So I am pushing my little Canon SD 550 to its limits in the meantime. Go check out my photography stream on Flickr to see yesterday’s interesting results of a mix of rain, smoke and fireworks. Please add me as a contact there so I can see your pix too. Again, if you are a photography community user and have any tips for me on how to get more involved, please let me know. Thanks!

Tags:   community · fireworks · Flickr · photography · pictures

Between RSS, FriendFeed, Twitter and about a dozen other sites, the new media that I consume daily is overwhelming. The upside to this is that as an early adopter/tech hobbyist I get the skinny on sites immediately; the downside is that the real gems get lost in the flotsam (and for the sake of politeness, I’ll just say that the gems in social media are few and far between).

I am resolving, today, to put more time and effort into this blog by posting the links to gems I want to remember. I hope you will find them shiny too. I’ll call them Social Media Gems (SMG); I created a spanking new category just for these links.

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Tags:   blog · blogging · Chris Brogan · social media gem · workflow

My real life and super-smart friend Bob (who lives two streets away) runs a very popular art blog.  Bob’s achieved blogging success most of us don’t even know is possible.   Besides all the normal stuff like lots of hits, etc., Bob is sought after by art book publishers to review their latest releases.   Now one of those publishers is working with Bob to sponsor a contest to give away one of its most pricey art books.   See the blurb below and click over to Bob’s site to check it out.   If you aren’t an art connoisseur, click over anyway to look at the amazing paintings!   From Bob:

“’I am the most arrogant man in France,’ Gustave Courbet once bragged, doing his best to live up to that reputation through the boldness of his art and personality.  Thanks to the generosity of the awesome people at Abbeville Press, Art Blog By Bob hosts the first Art Contest By Bob in which a copy of Ségolène Le Men’s Courbet will be given to one lucky reader. (See my review of Courbet HERE.) Are you arrogant enough to think you deserve a free copy of this lushly illustrated, beautifully written, coffee-table book retailing at $135 USD?”

Find all all the details here.

Tags:   art · blog · bob · book · Courbet

A friend who subscribes to the WSJ online sent me this article.  I’ll be able to read it for only 7 days, so I copied and pasted it here so we could discuss.  I’ll talk more later about choices and decision-making, which is really the heart of the matter between these two opposing theories.

_____________________________________

Study Refutes

Niche Theory

Spawned by Web

July 2, 2008; Page B5

Had PowerPoint been around 150 years ago, Thoreau might have warned us to beware not only of enterprises that require new clothes, but also of those that require new paradigms.

A book from 2006, “The Long Tail,” was one of those that appear periodically and demand that we rethink everything we presume to know about how society works. In this case, the Web and its nearly unlimited choices were said to be remaking the economy and culture. Now, a new Harvard Business Review article pushes back, and says any change occurring may be of an entirely different sort.

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Tags:   anderson · decision-making · harvard · Long tail · marketing · Social Media · WSJ

***I posted about Multiple Intelligences back in November of 2007.  This is an expansion of that short post.***

Twitter is a site where a person can post a message to a bunch of friends at once.  Sometimes Twitter works like a bulletin board (where you pin up your notice and get no replies) and sometimes it works like an on-line chatroom with a ton of conversations going on at once.

Last night I replied to a post from my friend Laura.  She questioned how it would be possible for someone named Angelina to have a high IQ score (around 136 I think).  Assuming Laura was referring to Angelina Jolie, I responded that a 136 score, albeit high, isn’t uncommon and Ms. Jolie seems capable of such a score.

A firestorm erupted, and this time it wasn’t about Angelina Jolie’s shenanigans.  All sorts of Tweets (i.e. posts) popped up containing anger over the concept of intelligence testing and the permanent public (and more important personal) branding that can ensue afterwards.  My contacts on Twitter interpreted my Tweets as support for and true belief in the IQ test.  At 12:30 a.m., after much varied discussion and much qualification from me, the storm died down enough for me to go to bed.  Embers were still smoldering this morning, as I had a quite few messages waiting for me in my inbox.

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Tags:   character · fiction · gardner · intelligence · IQ · psychology · Right-in

The Age Curve: How to Profit from the Demographic Storm (Hardcover)

by Kenneth W. Gronbach

The Age Curve is a book about numbers.  Don’t worry.  The author does the math.

The author Kenneth Gronbach, a proud member of the Baby Boomer generation, outlines the numbers of live births in the US starting from the beginning of the 1900’s and ending with projected estimates in 2010.  This sounds boring, but this book is a fun read filled with anecdotes, quirky observations and the occasional easy-to-understand chart.   [Read more →]

Tags:   book review · demographics · markets

My husband Gary and I have a friend (who we haven’t seen in a while) named Dave. We met Dave in college. Dave was a very short and slight guy with a personality bigger than a house. Dave was bubbly and he loved everything and everybody. Besides the incredible penchant for enjoying life, Dave seemed like your typical college student. He hung out with us, drank beer, played pool (and lost miserably but never cared) and stressed over term papers. Everything was copacetic.

Until one day Dave announced that he was getting a part-time job at the McDonald’s on campus. That in itself didn’t seem so bad, but then Dave enthusiastically announced that he asked for the first shift. A cry of disbelief rose from the room of friends. “DUDE! That means you’ll have to get up at like, 4 AM in the MORNING!” Dave brushed off our warnings of sure failure and happily started his job at MickeyD’s, sometimes leaving the house before the sun rose. We all gave him a week.

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Tags:   character · demographics · generation · meme · personality · Right-in · sociology