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Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armour and attacked a hot fudge sundae. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Look, love/hate The Donald, but he is a brilliant businessman. He knows how to milk a good PR run and he has turned the lemons of Tara Conner's partying into more and more attention for the Miss USA pageant. He's also taken the heat off of Tara Conner and put it on: Rosie O'Donnell, who is also milking this for all its worth.
More viewers for Miss USA next time. More viewers for The View.
Ah yes... be controversial, get attention. In this attention economy, Trump seized on this beautifully. So did Rosie. Barbara Walters loves them both.
There's a chemical abundant in our society today that doesn't get enough attention. It's called Dihydrogen Monoxide. Here's a fact sheet about its dangers from this awareness web site.
Each year, Dihydrogen Monoxide is a known causative component in many thousands of deaths and is a major contributor to millions upon millions of dollars in damage to property and the environment. Some of the known perils of Dihydrogen Monoxide are:
Death due to accidental inhalation of DHMO, even in small quantities.
Prolonged exposure to solid DHMO causes severe tissue damage.
Excessive ingestion produces a number of unpleasant though not typically life-threatening side-effects.
DHMO is a major component of acid rain.
Gaseous DHMO can cause severe burns.
Contributes to soil erosion.
Leads to corrosion and oxidation of many metals.
Contamination of electrical systems often causes short-circuits.
Exposure decreases effectiveness of automobile brakes.
Found in biopsies of pre-cancerous tumors and lesions.
Given to vicious dogs involved in recent deadly attacks.
Often associated with killer cyclones in the U.S. Midwest and elsewhere, and in hurricanes including deadly storms in Florida, New Orleans and other areas of the southeastern U.S.
Thermal variations in DHMO are a suspected contributor to the El Nino weather effect.
That's alarming, and yet this substance is used globally, unchecked. In fact, many corporations make money from its use.
This scandalous chemical... well, it's common to you. In fact, you need it to live. It's water. Yep - good ol' H2O. Di (two) hydrogen Mon (one) oxide. Two hydrogen, one oxygen. Water.
Yes, the web site given above is a spoof. But my goodness, what a lot of heavy breathing. How easy it is to use the proper buzzwords - corporations, death, contamination, etc - and bring people to a stupid cause without using their heads and without asking the right questions.
Take a look at this Penn and Teller video, in which a young woman in their employ goes to an environmental rally and gets hundreds of the people there to sign a petition against Dihydrogen Monoxide.
Now, me personally, I don't have an opinion about global warming. I really don't. I don't have enough facts, and despite Al Gore's presentation in his movie, there are enough folks presenting just as many facts discounting his presentation.
Gore repeatedly labels carbon dioxide as "global warming pollution" when, in reality, it is no more pollution than is oxygen. CO2 is plant food, an ingredient essential for photosynthesis without which Earth would be a lifeless, frozen ice ball. The hypothesis that human release of CO2 is a major contributor to global warming is just that - an unproven hypothesis, against which evidence is increasingly mounting.
In fact, the correlation between CO2 and temperature that Gore speaks about so confidently is simply non-existent over all meaningful time scales. U of O climate researcher Professor Jan Veizer demonstrated that, over geologic time, the two are not linked at all. Over the intermediate time scales Gore focuses on, the ice cores show that CO2 increases don't precede, and therefore don't cause, warming. Rather, they follow temperature rise - by as much as 800 years. Even in the past century, the correlation is poor; the planet actually cooled between 1940 and 1980, when human emissions of CO2 were rising at the fastest rate in our history.
So again, don't know. But what would be great is if we got some irrefutable facts on the table, rather than half-facts, as the chart Gore gives in his movie does. He shows a period of 650,000 years and says that a rise in CO2 is tied inextricably to a rise in temperature, his argument being that "greenhouse gasses" will bring about global warming. But if you break that chart down and look at the years in smaller increments, as the scientist quoted in the above article explains, temperature rise always precedes CO2 increase. Take a look...
I got this chart from this guy, who puts the facts on the table. Kudos to him.
Gore's movie may have many things right. Don't know. Environmentalists might be right about global warming and other ecological maladies facing us. Don't know. But a bit of healthy skepticism and fact-checking is certainly in order before we hop on the groupthink train and let ourselves be alarmed about things we don't know. Too many people, on all sides of the political spectrum, approach crap from "authorities" uncritically. As a result, folks might actually, you know, petition against water - catastrophic substance though it is.
I watched Double Jeopardy with my son, Nick, tonight. It's a decent film. What struck me though was the sheer focus of Ashley Judd's character - her sense of self and purpose. There was no doubt in her. She asserted herself without a second thought. In the scene above, she knew that driving her truck into a car was exactly right. Think about that - what circumstances would it take for you to know that totalling another car was the right thing to do?
I was chatting with a friend earlier today and I mentioned that I admired her strength in dealing head on with people. Very factual, very much cards on the table. I think this is somewhat similar to being able to take criticism without being defensive. Both require a certain selflessness. In one, I can't worry about what others think of me. Call me an asshole, but truth is truth, and I just need to put it out there. In the other, I can't worry about what others think of me. Truth is truth, so if I screwed up, let's get it out into the open and I'll have to deal with it.
Another friend of mine calls this "just dealing in the irrefutable facts." Truth. If you deal in the irrefutable facts, and not personalities/politics, then the job is much easier. But it takes a certain moxie to disregard the feelings of others and just let them assimilate the facts as they are. Sure, there's a way to state these things that makes them more easily absorbed, but ultimately, you can't worry about it. Irrefutable facts are, well, irrefutable - without looking silly for trying to ignore them.
This is something on which I need to work, both in standing firm to assert myself in a tough situation and in knowing how to best communicate it. One key to communication in this area that I'm learning is the value of the one-on-one conversation. If I take the time to lay the facts out, most people will readily accept them for the truth that they are.
My personal favorite: the Cabbage Patch Snacktime Kid, with mechanical jaws that would chew whatever went into its mouth. It found most anything to be finger-eatin'lickin' good!
I said recently that my site needs a makeover. Yeah, after some more thought, not so much.
The reason? Feeds. Don't know what a feed is? Get educated. You need to know. A feed allows you to access pure content across many web sites at once. It means that you don't have to visit each web site individually to read what the web site offers.
This has a lot of ramifications... this affects everything from advertising to copyright laws. For example, if I have ads on my web site, but you're accessing my web site's content through a feed, then you, most likely, won't see my ads. (I wonder how Google feels about this?) My content now appears through a new portal, if you will, alongside everyone else's content. So whose content is it really? Does this rob me of my identity? My brand?
How my web site appears no longer matters. Sure, I'll get occasional folks browsing me from search results. But increasingly, I'll get folks trafficking my site through feeds. That's sobering.
What's more, if there is a way to bundle my content with others' content and repackage it like a front page, isn't the front page the presentation? The look of my web site doesn't matter.
I still think this technology and methodology is in its infancy. But the long-term effects are staggering.
Brands don't matter. Look doesn't matter. This is true because in this new world, you can't manage either.
It's just content. And how you attract attention to your content. That's it. And that's huge.
ETC: I was explaining to my sons that Time magazine's person of the year was them, or "You." If you're reading this, you're Time's Person of the Year. Congratulations. But they have more to say along the lines of what I'm saying:
Look at 2006 through a different lens and you'll see another story, one that isn't about conflict or great men. It's a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It's about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people's network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It's about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.
The tool that makes this possible is the World Wide Web. Not the Web that Tim Berners-Lee hacked together (15 years ago, according to Wikipedia) as a way for scientists to share research. It's not even the overhyped dotcom Web of the late 1990s. The new Web is a very different thing. It's a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter. Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it's really a revolution.
And we are so ready for it. We're ready to balance our diet of predigested news with raw feeds from Baghdad and Boston and Beijing. You can learn more about how Americans live just by looking at the backgrounds of YouTube videos—those rumpled bedrooms and toy-strewn basement rec rooms—than you could from 1,000 hours of network television.
And we didn't just watch, we also worked. Like crazy. We made Facebook profiles and Second Life avatars and reviewed books at Amazon and recorded podcasts. We blogged about our candidates losing and wrote songs about getting dumped. We camcordered bombing runs and built open-source software.
Raw feeds. Yes. Show me what I want in terms of content. Don't filter it for me. Don't sanitize it. Don't think you have to play editor for me. Let me do that for myself or I will find a way around you. Facilitate or die.
Further, let me have my own voice. Maybe that's the thing. If there is any content from beatcanvas that is worth consuming to you, you don't want it in my format. You want it in yours. You want it your way. Don't like my politics? What if you could edit that out? Don't like my art but you like my conceptual posts? What if it could be presented to you along with the content of others as you define?
The hierarchy is over. Top-down sucks. Give me tools that empower me with Mac-like intuitive ease and give me the content I want and don't waste my time with crap, be it ads or scrolling or visiting yeaterday's content. I want fresh and raw. I'll be my own editor. I'll remix as it makes sense for me to do.
Now apply all of that to any industry. Education. Medical. Financial. What if the medical community showed you a smorgasbord of medical content, expertise, testing, and so on and let you choose for yourself the best way to care for yourself, with advice from professionals along the way?
Marketing 2.0 - what does it look like and how does it play with this new era?
Here's my wish for the phase of blogs: I want the text of my favorite blogs to be converted to audio files for me to have available in mp3 format so that I can listen to them on an iPod at work, driving - wherever.
I bought a program called NaturalReader. With it, I'm able to copy text to the program and it reads the text in an almost natural voice:
As the Bush Doctrine has come under attack, there are those in America who have welcomed its apparent setbacks and defeats as a vindication of their criticism of the policy. But the problem is that that kind of vindication leaves America in a position where there are no good alternatives. The reason that there is general despair now is because if it proves to be true that the Bush Doctrine has proclaimed an idea of democratizing the Arab/Islamic world that is unattainable and undoable, then there are no remaining answers to how to counter ultimately the threat of Islamic radicalism.
It remains the only plausible answer - changing the culture of that area, no matter how slow and how difficult the process. It starts in Iraq and Lebanon, and must be allowed to proceed and not precipitate an early and premature surrender. That idea remains the only conceivable one for ultimately prevailing over the Arab Islamic radicalism that exploded upon us 9/11. Every other is a policy of retreat and defeat that would ultimately bring ruin not only on the U.S. but on the very idea of freedom.
Pretty amazing.
Some bloggers podcast and make their words available in audio, but few (any?) make all of their posts available in audio.
What if I could package up the textual content that I wanted available for myself, convert that to audio, and then easily transfer that to my iPod or whatever? That then becomes my own talk radio, if you will. I now package my own content completely. That saves me time. I don't have to just read sites to which I subscribe. I can save time and listen to them intsead, if I choose to do so.
That's what I want for Christmas.
ETC: Thinking a bit further, just as there are a few blog week in review podcasts, is there a market for a professional reader who gives voice to various sites? I think there might be.
For what it's worth, here's my rendition of the article. Because it's human, it's read with more meaning than NaturalReader.
