- Are you brave enough to say no to a high-stress holiday? "The problem with Christmas is not the batteries. The problem isn't even really the stuff. The problem with Christmas is that no one much likes it anymore."
- Richmond News Review podcast episode #23: Debate bid followup, buying local, media coverage gaps from last weekend.
- And don't forget to submit your suggestions for the upcoming podcast segment, What news stories did Richmond media miss in 2007?.
- Energy Efficiency Jobs at Google: Get paid to save the world (or at least to develop technology that prologngs its life a bit). "Business as usual will not deliver low-cost, clean energy fast enough to avoid potentially catastrophic climate change...We need creative and motivated entrepreneurs and technologists with expertise in a broad range of areas."
- What We Call The Media: a satirical and irerrverant look at the state of mainstream broadcast media
Category: website stuff
Another stop along the journey of trying to organize all the information in my life, without adding complexity:
I've been ignoring del.icio.us for a while now. I've seen little icons for it popping up on weblogs I read, seen references to it in articles on software and productivity (including one on my own company's weblog), and heard people using it in everyday conversation. But I really didn't understand it, or what it really did, or why anyone would use it. (Plus, it seems like a waste of a perfectly good domain name, icio.us.)
I'm still not sure I do, even after reading the site's own description of what it's for. This is a strange and disorienting place to be for someone whose job it is to have my finger on the pulse of web tech trends. But I'm trying out using it anway, and you can see my Chris Hardie del.icio.us page at http://del.icio.us/ChrisHardie. I guess it's just a list of web pages I've marked for...me? people in my "network"? the world?...to see, with various keywords associated so that I can...have keywords. Ummm, yeah, I think that's it. I kind of like it, but I don't know why.
Do you use del.icio.us? How? Why?
I love Flickr, which shows off the world we live in through the eyes and camera lenses of everyday folks. In the last week I've had a few of my photos posted there (most of which are released under the Creative Commons license) appear in some interesting spots:
- Schmap Nashville Travel Guide: a couple of photos I took at the Tennessee State Museuem are apparently now a part of the fourth edition of this online tourist guide. There may be a print version too, but I'm not sure where to find it.
- All Around Ohio for November 11: a photo I took of Antioch Hall at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio was featured in an article about the college staying open.
- Rest in peace, Rachel Burrell: friend, encourager, piano teacher, visionary, comfort to grieving children everywhere, and an amazing woman.
- Seven principles of community building: don't try to control the message, transparency is a must, participation is marketing, concept of audiences is outdated, build value, inspire with real information, manage distribution media to grow.
- A new episode of my podcast (online audio broadcast), the Richmond News Review: a great interview with Jason Truitt of the Palladium-Iteme, who talked candidly with me about the state of the paper's citizen journalism efforts.
- Unconference: a new way to bring people together and Open Space: a new way to run productive meetings. The next time you're considering having a meeting, gathering, summit, conference, colloquium, retreat, seminar or workshop, consider using these formats.
- Do you really know what's in that Chipotle food you're eating? Find out with the Chipotle Nutrition Calculator. My (now formerly) usual burrito has 1,336 calories in it.
- In the theme of nefarious co-opting important activist ideas into consumerist culture, apparently the cosmetics and plastic surgery industries are working on appealing to women with a new and unfortunate message: conforming to traditional notions of beauty is the new feminism.
- If you've ever received junk e-mail, you may be interested in the massive network of zombie computers (maybe even yours) that is powering the efforts of spammers and network abusers everywhere: Gathering 'Storm' Superworm Poses Grave Threat to PC Nets. Scary stuff.
- When you are in conflict with a partner, there are only two possible intentions: you either intend to protect yourself from hurt feelings or you intend to learn and grow from the experience. The difference between the two approaches can be the difference between successful conflict resolution and failure.
- Richmond residents are invited to a debate between mayoral candidates Sally Hutton and Rick Thalls this Wednesday. And did you know there are 17 people currently running for President of the United States? Wow.
- For consultants: Every project and every office has multiple personality types. How you work with them and how you manage the rationale of decisions and feedback is crucial to your success. By applying the right relationship management techniques, you can calm tension, communicate more easily, run your projects more efficiently — and you might get additional work since the relationship with the client will be strong from beginning to end.
- What does it mean to be on the ball? It means you've got good Flow. Especially important if you're creating websites.
There is a strange and unique destination out there in the political blogosphere called The Daily Kos. You may have heard of it - it's been called everything from one of the most defining websites of the modern political debate, to an analog of the Klu Klux Klan. I suspect it's actually somewhere in between (but for those who don't like encountering ideas they don't agree with, be careful about clicking through, you may find yourself uncomfortable).
I recently tried an experiment, where I took a couple of my blog postings from here, and cross-posted them on an account at Daily Kos. As a result, I got to learn about the strange culture that's evolved on this headline-making site. For example, a posting there is actually called a "Diary" (not a diary entry, just a diary). And there's apparently a whole crew of users of the site who go through reading the hundreds of diaries posted throughout the day, and they "Rescue" them, which means they highlight them for the rest of the users of the site to read. Apparently, I hit the Kosian jackpot of having my first two diaries ever rescued and discussed. Most interesting was how many people commented on the entries compared to their life on this site. I suppose that when you've built a critical mass in an online community, the content gets a lot more attention, no matter its quality.
Anyway, it was fun to know that a site read (and often condemned) by various national political and media figures had, for a brief time, a little linkage to my self-indulgent ramblings.
Now, slackers, how come I can't get 33 of you to comment on a blog post here?
Sometimes people forget how much information is being collected about them when they visit a website. It's actually not all that much - what IP address you're visiting from, what kind of operating system and web browser you're running, and perhaps what other website you came from in your visit. The real fun starts when you learn how to interpret the trends in that information, and start to drill down to what it might mean about a visitor.
For example, earlier this week, a user visited my website without any referring URL information. This means they probably entered the address directly in their browser's location bar, but it could also mean they followed a bookmark, or are actively trying to hide where they came from. As soon as they got to my site, they started searching for the word "congress" in my content. When I traced the IP address, it went back to a location in McLean, Virginia, which is the home of the Central Intelligence Agency.
So what can we conclude from this? Obviously, a CIA operative was investigating my website because in my ramblings about politics and the government, I've clearly come too close to the truth about a cover-up related to U.S. energy policy and the War on Terra, and now they're coming to take me away, ha-ha.
Hopefully this is a change for the better. Let me know what you think.
The image at the top is a stylized version of a photo of me. I'm standing in a fast-moving river, creating a disturbance and sloshing around me, as I look up at a beautiful sky in a moment of peace.
I've been reflecting recently on the different ways that my weblog sucks. And by "sucks," I mean "doesn't live up to the standards of what a popular, regularly-read weblog looks like." Popularity isn't necessarily my primary goal or even a goal at all, but it is nice to be recognized for the time and energy I put into some of the posts I write here. And therein lies the rub, I think:
Continue reading "Why this weblog sucks"
I remember back in the day (i.e. a few years ago), when you wanted to put video on your website, you needed to think about disk space, bandwidth, media format compatibility and a host of other issues before you could even hope to have people looking at the actual video content. Today, sites like YouTube and Google Video (soon to be one) make it as easy as uploading your video to their site and then linking to it. And as Jean Harper sort of noted (lamented, really), it's quite the craze with the kids.
So (or, despite that), I decided to throw up a few videos I've produced over the years to see what happens. There's my trip to Washington D.C. to ask the president not to invade Iraq, highlights from a conference on cultural change that I organized, a clip from an inspiring talk about peak oil, and highlights from the raising of a wind turbine at the Cope Environmental Center, which I've mentioned here before. These were shot with everything from a digital still camera to my GL-2 MiniDV rig, so the quality varies widely, but I've already generated 1 subscriber to my "channel", 49 views of my videos, and a comment. I love web-based social networking!
Let me know what you think.