Just thought I’d include a link to last year’s post about Remembrance Day.  I like that post.

Lest we forget.

Image by striatic

EDIT:  I went to my local Remembrance Day service this morning.  Simple and short – just the way I like it.  I’ll try to keep remembering.

Mitch Joe

These are the people who take the time to express their opinion, in public, that a particular book has no new content in it, or that someone’s blog post is just a rehash of old ideas.

There are various reasons for taking the time to damn something with faint praise, including:  self-promotion; attacking an enemy; or truly altruistic reasons for wanting someone to avoid spending their time material that’s better covered elsewhere.  Let’s look at the altruistic motive.

Mitch offers the following argument:

… you can learn something new from anyone at any time. The trick is in leaving yourself open to this experience. The trick is in always being a student.

This is a very good point!  You never know where you’re going to find a good story, a new technique, or inspiration, pure and simple.  It doesn’t seem to matter if you are a novice, a master, or anywhere in between. The danger to us is when we get stuck in execution mode or when we suffer from tunnel vision.

• In execution mode, we are focused on getting certain things done within a certain timeframe.
• When we have tunnel vision, we only look in a certain direction.  We don’t think to look in different places for new ideas in order to improve ourselves.

It doesn’t help that most organizations generally don’t encourage looking outward.  They encourage, or force, most employees to maintain an inward focus on repeatable execution for predictable results.  There’s no carrot or no pot of gold at the rainbow for you in these places if you stray into the outliers.

Sometimes this same tunnel vision occurs outside of a formal organization.  Peer pressure, or “common wisdom”, influence our behavior as well, don’t they?  If your friends, colleagues, or family tell you not to waste our time on something, you’ll often do what they say.  This is a concern that I have as we seem to move towards more of a recommendation mindset instead of an exploratory mindset.

Our (seeming) lack of free time  motivates us to efficiently use the spare hours and minutes.  I read a lot of content that talks about respecting the reader’s valuable time.  This type of respect is a key success factor for many content creators.

By placing your trust in a content creator (or curator), you are choosing the recommendation path.  You are letting someone else choose for you, just as if you were following along the suggestions that Amazon.com offers when you place an order, or if you follow the related posts generated by a tool like Zemanta.  You trust them to make good choices for you to use within your scarce free moments of time.

You sacrifice freedom and serendipity when you come to rely on recommendation.  True, there’s a lot of content out there, so you could waste a lot of time, or go insane, by trying to discover everything yourself.  It’s perfectly logical to follow the recommendations of a trusted advisor.  But it’s also good for you to explore on your own and find something new to share with your community.

It doesn’t have to be something completely new, either.  You can still find value in common knowledge that’s presented in a fresh and exciting way.  One person’s common knowledge could be your Next Big Thing.

I’m not saying that it’s wrong to review something and give an honest opinion.  It might be presumptuous, however, to say that something’s a waste of time even if it seems to be too basic.  We all have to make choices about how to use our time, and thinking that we don’t have time to do something, like exploring or refreshing ourselves on the basics, is ultimately a choice.

What do you think?  Is there good stuff to be found even in basic information?  Or should we be trying to shield people from mediocrity?

Image by Daisuke Shirako

I may be unobservant or naive, but I can’t really say that I have an arch-enemy, not a person anyway, especially since the little red headed guy from elementary school left the country a few years ago.  But I digress.

Villains don’t need to be people, though. They can be organizations, places, concepts, etc.  Attitudes can make great villains, too.  It’s easy to hate someone who likes things that you hate.  And it helps when you want to come up with material for blog posts.

There are times when I’ve been tempted to try to pick out a villain, an arch-nemesis for this blog, and use it to help refine the focus of Broadcasting Brain.  Ignorance, manipulation, arrogance, greed, hatred itself  - these are all worthy targets.

Here’s the thing, though:

Defining yourself by your villains, your nemesis, your arch-enemy is too easy.  It weakens you and empowers them.  Look at Lex Luthor:  his sole claim to fame is that he chose Superman as his arch-rival.  Despite his genius and riches, the fact that Superman continues to thwart his schemes continues to define Luthor as an incomplete shadow of a person who exists to get rid of his rival.  J. Jonah Jameson pushed his newspaper to tabloid rag status by defining Spider-Man as a public enemy.  The political right portrays the leaders of the political left as demonic spawn and vice versa.

There’s no doubt that picking a target makes it easy to hit.  But maybe it’s better that the target is a constructive goal or achievement instead of something to destroy.  It could be a harder path, fighting to create instead of destroying, but it could be a whole lot better.  Even if you’re just trying to publish a blog.

Image by purpleslog

Twitter Lists

This new way of slicing and dicing your Twitter content is the way to listen to the 412,331,310 other Twitter users that you don’t listen to today.  Or, rather, you would if you could hear them among the multitudes.  They were made from the same substance that went into the last few nails that were hammered into FriendFeed’s coffin.  Or something like that.

I have made one list so far, called Brainiacs.  Some people on it have complained that they don’t consider themselves to be geniuses, or even very smart.  To which I say, “stupid is as stupid does”, or “stupid is as stupid says”.  What they don’t realize is that Brainiacs are the ones who have successfully passed through the Broadcasting Brain subliminal brainwashing program. No, I think you’re incredibly smart, witty, and talented, therefore you are.

So, we’ll see.  Coming soon to a Web near you:  Twitter Lists Lists; Twitter Indexes; Twitter Lists Indexes; Twitter Indexes Lists; and many more permutations of the same with the terms tags, favorites, bookmarks, shortcuts, and stickies added in for good measure. Eventually it will become so complicated that people will create separate Twitter accounts for the ability to make it easier to follow people.  And then pop will eat itself.

Nonetheless, Twitter Lists are easy to use.  Just remember, it’s not the number of lists that you belong to, nor the size of your List that matters.  It’s about how well you use your List.  Practice safe Listing, OK?  If you show me your List, I’ll show you mine.  OK?

Penelope Trunk

Her blog is my new virtual drug.  You never know what will show up there and so there’s actually some anticipation for each new post.  Kind of like 43folders.com without the anxiety-inducing wait between posts.

It’s like the blog’s written by an alien who is trying to explain how things work on Earth.  A suspiciously human-sounding alien, but an alien nonetheless.  Fortunately, the alien writes well about interesting topics and only manages to horrify its readers about once twice per month.  I think it’s a well-intentioned alien who’s trying to deal with a lot of weird and difficult but occasionally wonderful things in its life.  In public.

Politics and public policy

All I’ll say at this point is that anything related to these topics bring out both the best and the worst in people.

RSS Readers

I still use Google Reader faithfully, even if I delete 90% of the posts in the reader without reading them.  Uh, wait, did I just say that out loud?  In all seriousness, the structure and order behind a RSS feed reader works much better for me than trying to comb through Twitter and the real time Web to catch interesting links before they get swept away.  How Web 1.5 of me.

Facebook

Is the application to beat.  It’s the common denominator of Web experience.  Virtually everyone is there… even I am.

The problem with trying to build authority

No one should ever try to be 100% serious, earnest, and helpful all of the time.  It’s inhuman.

Background

The event that I referred to in my previous post became official last Thursday.  In summary, my province (New Brunswick) has signed a Memorandum of Understanding to sell the vast majority of its power utility to another province (Quebec) in exchange for debt relief and a five year guarantee on electrical power rates.  The two governments largely negotiated the deal in secret and announced it as noted above, launching a new website about the deal at the same time.  There are reports that some mainstream media outlets caught wind of the deal about six weeks ago but it only leaked to local media within the past couple of weeks.

New Brunswick’s power utility (NB Power) has accumulated a lot of debt over the decades, currently pegged at $ 4.7 billion (Canadian), with fluctuating profitability.  Our nuclear power plant is currently undergoing a refurbishment (the first of its kind for this kind of nuclear reactor) that’s over budget and considerably behind schedule – there’s a multi-billion dollar bill coming up for this, although part of it is in the $4.7 billion that I mentioned earlier.  Our main hydroelectric dam has structural problems due to an alkali-aggregate reaction and probably will need at least $1.0 billion in repairs EDIT:  a currently unknown amount of repairs at an unknown cost within the next 10 years. the projected lifespan of the dam is shorter than original estimates as a result of the reaction  (EDIT:  sorry, I got costs and lifespan wrong on this one.  Some estimates say the dam has 30 more years of power generating life; other estimates are shorter, so I don’t know what the lifespan and costs actually are.  My apologies, this could be more of a long term issue than a short term issue).   Power rates are relatively high in New Brunswick compared to the rest of Canada.

EDIT:  Nov. 3/09 – OK, things continue to be interesting with regards to the Mactaquac Hydro Dam:  in a CBC Radio question and answer session held today, Premier Shawn Graham stated that Mactaquac may have to be refurbished within the next 10 years and the price tag could be up to $3.0 billion.  Man, I wish my psychic powers were more reliable.  ;-)

Many aspects of the sale of NB Power certainly seem to contradict the election platform of the current provincial government, especially the statements that NB Power would not be sold. We have an election scheduled next year, so there’s a lot riding on this deal.  The deadline for turning the MOU into an actual deal is March 31, 2010.

The government’s use of social media

Various politicians have Twitter accounts and Facebook accounts, but they don’t seem to matter too much in this campaign.  As I mentioned earlier, the main focus of the campaign is the government’s own website about the deal.  It includes:

• a YouTube video made by Shawn Graham, the Premier (equivalent to a state governor) of New Brunswick, about the sale of NB Power
• links to key documents (i.e. the Memorandum of Understanding or MOU)
• a “blog” to which Premier Graham has made two posts since Oct. 29/09
• a section for NB citizens to write what they think about the deal – this section is moderated and apparently posts are disappearing at times, although this is unconfirmed
• contact names, phone numbers, and E-Mail addresses for several government officials

Clearly, the NB government wants this website to be the “conversation destination”.  By the way, I’m about 90% sure that it’s a hosted Wordpress blog.

The public’s use of social media

Despite the government’s intentions, the real conversation hub appears to be Facebook.  A Facebook Group called NO to Sale of NB Power now has over 11,600 members and is very active (note:  the population of New Brunswick is less than 800,000.)  There’s a lot of emotional posts on the group’s Wall, many of them quite angry.  There are 22 Discussion threads at this moment and over 200 posts in the threads.  I haven’t seen any government participation in this Facebook Group, but there’s a lot of posts to sift through there.

There are some signs of activity beyond angry Wall and discussion posts.  The members of the group are organizing a protest for November 17 via the group.  They are working on selecting a spokesperson through the Facebook Group.  There is also a discussion thread about creating a lawsuit to block the sale.

There’s a Twitter hashtag #nbpower4sale that’s being used to track conversation about the sale.  There still seems to be several Tweets an hour on the topic three days after the announcement.

The future remains to be seen (will any or all of these plans come to fruition), but there’s definitely lots of communication and signs of organization via social media, just not in the place that the NB government created for discussion.

EDIT (Nov. 2/09) - Lower Rates NB is another Facebook Group about the NB Power sale.  After looking at the members list, the Wall posts, and the website for this group, I have to conclude that this Facebook group is either directly maintained by someone affiliated with the government of New Brunswick or someone who is a fan of the Premier and/or his political party.  Directly or indirectly, it does appear that the NB government and/or the political party that is the governing party is engaging on Facebook.

What am I doing during this political/social media event?

First and foremost, I’m trying to remain neutral while I educate myself on the deal and the underlying economic situation in my province.  I’ll admit that I’m skeptical, nervous, and suspicious about this deal, but I really want to understand it better.  I can’t rule out the possibility that this deal is actually the best alternative we have.

There are three main activities that I’m engaging in with regards to these events:

• I created a Facebook Group called NB Power and Hydro-Quebec:  You Read, You Decide.  I’ve positioned it as an information resource and try to keep things neutral.  I invited a number of my own Facebook contacts to join it.  The group currently has 103 members.  Most of the Wall activity are links to related material about the sale that I’ve posted.  There have been a few Wall posts by other people but, for the most part, it’s quite tame.  There are four Discussion threads but they don’t have a huge amount of activity.
• I created a Wordpress.com blog about the NB Power sale.  It’s only got a few entries that are links to other information or restatements of parts of the MOU.
• I’ve used the #nbpower4sale hashtags to post links, thoughts, etc. about the deal on Twitter.  I’ve also used the hashtag to track other conversations.

What’s next?

This is a weird situation.  The sale of NB Power will have a profound long term impact on my family’s life, so I can’t realistically stay neutral about this situation.  For the time being, I’m just trying to learn more about what’s going on so I can draw some rational conclusions about this whole situation.

It’s a very emotional topic.  Many people could lose their jobs over time if this deal goes through.  It sure looks like there’s some significant short term economic gain to be had from this experience.  However, there are some significant risks and uncertainties that are scaring a lot of people.  The entire political process has made many people very angry at the government for their handling of this planned sale, especially when it looks like the Premier and his government have contradicted themselves in numerous ways.

If there’s any role that I want to play in this, it’s to help education people or, more appropriately, help them educate themselves.   Social media tools are well suited to doing this.  I think this political issue can be a useful case study and so I’ll periodically post updates.

This political event is NOT going to take over Broadcasting Brain, but it will be featured within.  It’s still relevant to a lot of the other subject matter that I discuss here.

As a final comment, if anyone has links to how social media have been used in similar situations, I’d welcome your comments and feedback (just like always!)

This is a big deal.

Or not.

It could be much ado about nothing.  We New Brunswickers may never notice any difference.  Heck, we could even benefit hugely if things are done correctly. But few people have any confidence of that happening when government is involved.  It’s not a knock; it’s just a fact.

The thing is, I’ve never had a platform or soapbox like this prior to blogging where I could broadcast my thoughts to the world, share facts, etc.  It’s kind of cool but it’s also scary and sobering.  I don’t pretend to have the kind of reach that many of my blogging peers have.  At the same, my megaphone is a little bit louder than most people’s.  It’s an opportunity.  But is it also a responsibility, too?  As a blogger and social media user, do I have a responsibility to force debate, spread truthful information, etc.? I’m still mindful of the blogosphere post that I wrote a couple of days ago.  I can’t pretend to represent the general public of my country, my province, or even my town.

And here’s the thing:  I’m contemplating the possibility of using social media to prevent change.  They really don’t have that one anywhere in the social media handbook, do they?  Most things I seem to see around the Web sites I frequent and the books I read seem to be about using these tools to make new things happen.  Preventing change is kind of a retro idea, don’t you think? If I do decide to speak publicly about this pending government change, I won’t be writing about it here – I’ll create a new place for that. But I’m curious to know what you think.

Do those of us in social media have a responsibility to stand up for doing the right thing, even if it means preventing change?  Should we keep personal opinion out of it?  Should we try to be like journalists?  What do you think?

Update: I did create a new blog for this topic.  You can find it here.

Image by scazon

Here’s the video.  My thoughts are below:

Makebelieve Help, Old Butchers, and Figuring Out Who You Are (For Now) from Merlin Mann on Vimeo.

SPOILERS BELOW:

On one hand, I think Merlin’s got a great message in this video and it’s well worth listening to.  The core message is the following:  people make money off your need for information and temporary loss of confidence that comes when you’re trying something new and different.  Asking for help is good, important, and worth doing when you need to but…  the best way (perhaps the only way) to get good at something is to actually do it.  And do it.  And do it.

On the other hand… it sounds like Merlin is just kind of putting his thoughts together in the video and so it rambles on a bit, with a few interesting diversions, before he really hits home with the point.  Either that or it’s a presentation style that he uses.

Nonetheless, even though most of the internet marketing industry will probably despise his video and the message behind it, it’s still a valid point.  Or not in spite of, but because of.  After all, there are plenty of unscrupulous leeches that will prey on your emotional desires in order to sell you crap that won’t replace the need for effort, time, patience, and the drive for self-improvement.

It may take some patience, but I think this video is definitely worth watching.  Go ahead.  What are you waiting for?  Tell me what you thought of his video.

Hat tip once again to Jay at Tape Noise Diary for scouting this one out.  You were right, Jay.

I’ve been chewing over Paul O’Flaherty’s nearly radioactive post since I read it earlier this week.  In summary, his diatribe is hyper-critical of a blogger who may or may not have been treated poorly by the TSA in Atlanta, but who probably took a very liberal interpretation of the word “truth”.

O’Flaherty seemed even angrier at the seeming hordes of bloggers who:

a)  took this person’s words as gospel without questioning
b)  then proceeded to NOT berate this person when huge gaps of her story began to look rather false while she was associated with a respected blogging community and had a badge on her site about blogging with integrity.

O’Flaherty seemed to think that the blogosphere, a grouping of content publishers that’s hard to adequately identify or pinpoint, is composed of spineless individuals that resemble sheep more than human beings:

I’m truly sick of todays blogosphere, where the ultra polite and light on brainwave activity have massivezombie hordes follower numbers while those who dare to express an actual opinion are ostracized to the edges of mediocrity.

And furthermore:

Heaven forbid that someone be different. That someone suggest we don’t all have to brown nose each other all the time.

When the hell is the blogosphere going to finally grow up and stop moaning about what it doesn’t have, what bloggers believe (naively) they are entitled to and act like adults.

Adults can have opinions. We don’t have to go along with the crowd. We can do something different and be part of the community.We don’t have to think that every god damn post by every idiot we just happen to know is praiseworthy to the point of gushing…

We can call a spade a spade. We can call people out for what they’ve done wrong and praise them for what they’ve achieved. We can regulate ourselves without a laid out set of rules or crappy badges in our sidebars. I mean seriously who besides those that display them know what they’re for anyway?

All we have to do is accept that we are adults and that we have a community to protect and build if we ever want to get taken seriously.

The underlying assumption behind O’Flaherty’s post is that there is a community of bloggers, commonly been referred to as the blogosphere, with norms, mores, and rules of conduct.  Or that there used to be one, anyway.  He thinks it’s dead now.

Here’s one definition of the blogosphere (via Wikipedia), which seems to have the meaning that O’Flaherty believes (or believed) in:

The blogosphere is made up of all blogs and their interconnections. The term implies that blogs exist together as a connected community (or as a collection of connected communities) or as a social network in which everyday authors can publish their opinions.

Nick Carr pronounced the death of the blogosphere in 2008, echoing a similar sentiment:

While there continue to be many blogs, including a lot of very good ones, it seems to me that one would be hard pressed to make the case that there’s still a “blogosphere.” That vast, free-wheeling, and surprisingly intimate forum where individual writers shared their observations, thoughts, and arguments outside the bounds of the traditional media is gone. Almost all of the popular blogs today are commercial ventures with teams of writers, aggressive ad-sales operations, bloated sites, and strategies of self-linking. Some are good, some are boring, but to argue that they’re part of a “blogosphere” that is distinguishable from the “mainstream media” seems more and more like an act of nostalgia, if not self-delusion.

Carr also had the following comments on blogging:

“Blogging” has always had two very different definitions, of course. One is technical: a simple system for managing and publishing content online, as offered through services such as WordPress, Movable Type, and Blogger. The other involves a distinctive style of writing: a personal diary, or “log,” of observations and links, unspooling in a near-real-time chronology. When we used to talk about blogging, the stress was on the style. Today, what blogs have in common is mainly just the underlying technology – the “publishing platform” – and that makes it difficult to talk meaningfully about a “blogosphere.”

There’s an implication among many people that blogosphere equates to:

• the general public or public opinion
• common knowledge
• the “grapevine”
• or some form of shared opinion held by a very large group of people

This may have been true in the heyday (re:  earliest days) of Web 1.0 technology moving into Web 2.0 technology, piggybacking off the original weblogs and the journaling websites (and forums and USENET and listservs and BBSes and….)  But it’s like what happens when your favorite “hole in the wall” restaurant is finally discovered by the masses:  a whole new crowd enters.  Or a crowd of crowds.  And they bring their cultures, biases, hopes, dreams, attitudes that get stirred into a stew that becomes quite unrecognizable to the earliest denizens.

In the aggregate, the blogosphere is no more united or homegenous these days than public opinion is.  Public opinion is based on percentages, slices of pie charts, and groupings based on seemingly common attributes.  Not all Americans hold all of the same values and opinions, nor do Europeans, Christians, wine drinkers, football fans, basket weavers, or teenagers.  Sadly, in a way, this fictional blogosphere (which is a term I use frequently, I must admit) was mortally wounded by Web 2.0, when it became a lot easier to join the club with tools like MySpace, Blogger, and now Twitter.  It’s hard to maintain a culture when it becomes huge – changes, mutations, etc. will happen in republic or democratic environment.

Here are other things that the blogosphere is not:

• a country (like or unlike the United States of America)
• a religion, cult, or sect
• an ethnic group
• a social club
• a political party
• a company or business
• a focus group
• composed of participants in continuous public opinion polls
• a homogeneous community

It does share some traits of all of these things, but it isn’t any of them.

The blogosphere (and, if we really want to complicate things, the entire continuum of social media applications/spaces) is really an ongoing fair or marketplace.  Or, perhaps more specifically, it’s the fair grounds and the city block that the marketplace inhabits.  It’s a technology framework and a space of places for people’s minds to inhabit, shout into the pipes, and sometimes get a response back.

My point is this:  this elastic, heterogeneous world of minds is too big, too varied, and subject to too many agendas to realistically believe that people would not use it for different reasons.  The collection of people using digital media is not a common society, sharing common beliefs.  It’s just an ever-growing slice of the thoughts and creations of the human race.  And we’re messy.

But, as hard as it might be to enforce, having a few good common principles certainly would make sense, wouldn’t it?  Honesty, integrity, consideration, transparency, charity, self-improvement – all good things, right?

Let’s look at one of O’Flaherty’s points again:

Adults can have opinions. We don’t have to go along with the crowd. We can do something different and be part of the community.We don’t have to think that every god damn post by every idiot we just happen to know is praiseworthy to the point of gushing…

This is key, in my opinion.  Basically, the blogosphere, originally derived from the playground of scientists, educated people, free thinkers, etc. (who could be messy, nasty, and uncivilized at times, make no mistake about it) has become a more representative cross-section of humanity.  The rules or tendencies that govern the groups that emerge from this mass of bodies are duplicating as well.  Politics and power struggles don’t get left behind when our minds jump into digital media; neither do motivations, attitudes, etc.  Social contagion, echoing, conformity:  they come along for the ride as well.

The blogosphere is no utopia and it never really was.  For awhile these online worlds were places where humans could temporarily escape many of the patterns and behaviors of humanity, trying to exist in realms created by binary codes and patterned in new ways.  Today’s digital realm is imperfect, crowded in spots, and so on.

It’s perfectly fine to have high ideals for human behavior and to want a better world.  It may be still be out there.  But did it really exist before?  I doubt it.  Is the blogosphere going to die?  I’d argue it’s broadening and mutating.  I think there are places for standards of conduct, etc. but the fact is that it’s basically becoming the physical world and if we can’t agree on things how should be run here, it’s a huge challenge to expect perfection elsewhere, even in a digital world.

Image by fdecomite

Mathew Ingram wrote an intriguing piece about the newspaper after he moderated a panel on the future of the newspaper between two media experts (Clay Shirky and Andrew Keen). He argued that newspapers are an important source of serendipity, whereby readers discover interesting things that they might not have found otherwise.  His post, and the links contained within, is a must-read jumping on point if you’re wondering what’s going on with newspapers.

After I read his post and some of the linked material (check out the comments section for more links and information), a few thoughts came to mind:

• Are newspapers suffering from lack of readership in addition to the decline in advertising spending?
• If there are fewer newspaper readers, is it because of a lack of time as much as anything else?  Do we collectively have less time to read a newspaper from cover to cover and discover things by accident?  Does atomized content (where you can get individual stories as opposed to having to read the entire newspaper, magazine, or other content bundle) better for busier people?
• Is the size of the newspaper becoming a turn off?  The larger editions take up a heck of a lot of space, after all.
• How many people are reading newspapers at home as opposed to other places?  I know that I tended to read newspapers more when I travel than at home.

In my own experience, I don’t subscribe to the print editions of newspapers, but I enjoy reading them when I find them.  However, it does take some time to read through a whole newspaper, doesn’t it?  Is it a problem of us not taking the time (or having the time) to sit down and read a newspaper cover to cover without interruption?

What do you think?  Do you still read newspapers?  Where?  When?

Image by Monica Arellano-Ongpin

I am working on a permanent solution – please bear with me.

EDIT:  hopefully we’ll have a new theme here, too.  Soon.