Privacy & Social Network Contact Management
[ Comments Off ]Posted on January 13, 2010 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Wednesday, January 13th, 2010Think you’re building a powerful contact list with sites like Facebook? Try exporting your contacts. AND: Why you might as well get used to a new definition of the word privacy.
 Online privacy? Puh! The future probably lies with initiatives like the DataPortability Project |
I was amused recently when people expressed surprise that Mark Zuckerberg publicly declared privacy a thing of the past, and wondered if the alleged tell-all by a former Facebook employee was for real. Please, people. How can you possibly expect to share vast amounts of personal data online using shopping sites, Facebook, and cloud services like Google Docs and then expect to maintain any semblence of true privacy? This apparently may be a generational issue, and personally, I find myself bridging the generations on this one. This whole issue was driven home hard for me recently, and here’s how: As part of my work over the past ten years, I’ve experimented casually with forms of social networking going all the way back to the now-defunct GeoCities.com. Although I’ve often consulted with clients to implement the various available tools, I’ve done little to use them myself in a purposeful way; although I’m a very social person, I’m also a very private person. As an example, although I’ve logged into Facebook daily for over a year, I don’t use it as a serious business tool, and don’t very often share serious personal thoughts on issues there. I’ve mostly used it to reconnect with old friends, meet a few new ones, and banter humorously with them. I also only have about 150 friends, because I’m not what what in pop lingo has been called a Facebook Friend Whore. In spite of this, and in spite of not being active on LinkedIn, Xing, or other more business-oriented sites, I have a primary network of about 300 valued contacts, and an extended contact list of maybe 1500 people. So while preparing to launch some new projects this year, I was aware that I’d have to update and verify my contact lists, which I try to do annually. The problem? Like me, you may have noticed (depending on your tech lifestyle) that – because of the pervasive adoption of texting, Skype, and Facebook – your e-mail volume and phone time have dropped off significantly over the past year. A lot of casual connecting – which is the very basis of successful networking – happens on sites like Facebook. Historically, I would maintain most of my contacts in Outlook or Thunderbird, and export this info to Excel to “massage” the data. This became profoundly problematic this year, when I was reminded that Facebook and other sites make it nearly impossible to export your contacts. In fact, they may shut down your account if you use certain tools to do so. So after doing a bunch of research, I ended up Read the rest of this entry »
Food Stamps Feel A Lot Classier On A Credit Card
[ 4 Comments ]Posted on January 8, 2010 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Friday, January 8th, 2010One in eight Americans is benefitting from food stamps. Are you one of them? Would you be if you had to?
I joke sometimes about being a socialist, but in reality, I’m the type of person who’s more inclined to work within the system I’m born into. Since I was born in one of the most capitalism-obsessed nations on Earth, and raised in an intellectual, bleeding heart liberal college community, I’ve always had an odd mix of values. I’ve never applied for “welfare” of any kind, including unemployment (okay, 3 months when I was 18!), food stamps, or other kinds of assistance, but I think “the poor” are entitled to such help. In the past, I’ve always found it easy to balance these vaguely conflicted values, mainly because the overall economic situation in the states made it possible for me to go get some kind of work in thin times. I think a lot of “average” Americans feel the same way, but recently I was surprised to find that several “average” friends of mine were using something I’d never heard of to defray expenses: a Michigan Bridge Card. Suddenly being broke seemed a lot less shameful to me. Somehow “defraying expenses with a bridge card” sounds a lot better than “buying hot dogs with food stamps“. And apparently this is a national trend; the New York Times has a whole series called The Safety Net, where I ran across this interactive map that made me realize that in the county I live in (home to the relatively prestigious University of Michigan), one in ten people are collecting food stamps. This kind of blew me away, and when I add that to my ongoing ire over the secretive bailouts of billionaire bankers and the impending commercial real estate crash , I start thinking a little differently. As a self-employed person, I made some financial mis-steps over the last couple of years that I’ve struggled to bounce back from. I’m sure this is the basis for my anger about bank bailouts; no one came along to bail ME out and wipe the credit slate clean. But maybe it’s time to revise my strategy. I mean the NYT is literally advising us that walking away from our mortgages is okay. So why shouldn’t we “strategically default” and go on government support? How about you? Are you struggling? Would you accept government assistance if you were? Let’s not forget that the banking industry did, and they’re money experts!
Whatever Will We Call This Decade?
[ 3 Comments ]Posted on December 10, 2009 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Thursday, December 10th, 2009Help me out here, ’cause I got nothin’. Zero. Nil. Zilch. Nada. Nought.
Well, as the year and the decade come to a close, it’s time to start rounding up all those lists of the best of the….oh wait. Ten years have passed, and we still haven’t decided on a name for the friggin’ decade? The oughts? The noughts? The O’s? Nothing seems to quite work. Which is perhaps appropriate, the decade began with a bunch of nothing; the Y2K bug was a big no show, the first election of the decade was a zero sum game, and the biggest stars of the decade were genuine nobodies. Calling the decade the “oughts” won’t happen, but might be fitting for a few reasons. It’s a word that no-one knows, for a decade that has no identity, and it has two silent letters in it. Probably the only hope for naming these ten years is for someone to nail the character of the decade the way that some people refer to the 70′s as the “Me Decade”. And never mind the name, how will the decade be remembered? If the 70′s were disco, leisure suits, The Joy of Sex and Ford Pintos, the 80′s yuppies, Reagan, and Electropop, the 90′s infohighways, grunge, and school shootings, how will we characterize 2000-2009? It’s never what you think it will be. The seventies were probably most influenced by Nixon and the oil embargoes, but we remember disco balls and polyester. I think we’ll be surprised that everyone will forget the whole Bush-driven annihilation of privacy rights and wars of aggression, the bank bailouts and corruption (I bet you already forgot all about Enron, didn’t you!), and remember Susan Boyle
Urban Tribalism: From Gore Lolitas To Juggalo Furries
[ 2 Comments ]Posted on November 8, 2009 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Sunday, November 8th, 2009If you thought Trekkies were scary, you ain’t seen nothin yet.
Before the white man came, the Americas were populated by hundreds, if not thousands (there are 749 listed here) of tribes that spread from the arctic circle to the tip of South America. Funny how things don’t change; although hundreds of indigenous tribes were wiped out by European colonization, hundreds of urban tribes have sprung up in their place. This is true all across the globe, actually; we tend to think of nations and ethnicities as the most useful way to categorize groups of people, but in fact, the enormous number of subcultures within a culture often have more enduring values that outlive the greater culture itself. In the states, we’re most familiar with the broader subcultures like Beatniks, Bikers, Hippies, and Punks, but there are dozens and dozens more that actually have names, and some of them of them are pret-ty darn peculiar. Many of the newer urban tribes are Internet or pop media driven; Furries, Cosplayers, and Trekkies all have sci-fi/fantasy roots, but wouldn’t exist without the web to connect them. I mean, c’mon. They only leave their computers long enough to order pizza and go to conventions, as far as I know. A breed that’s somehow oddly related to this bunch – Role Playing Gamers – seems to eschew fashion and looks for brains, but probably ends up standing in the same corner at a cocktail party. Then there are subcultures spawned by music, which brings us the more familiar Goths and Emos, but also meanders into the more obscure, like Juggalos (fans of the band Insane Clown Posse), or in a frightening collision of cultures, the Juggalo Furry. Which has been described as being “like a trainwreck raping a tire fire“. When this sort of music-inspired tribe evolves because of international media distribution, the urban tribe ends up being almost like a cargo cult, as in the case of the Argentinian Rolingos (inspired by the Rolling Stones), or the Congolese Hindubills (inspired by Buffalo Bill movies). And then it gets weird. Both the Swedish Raggare and the Chilean Pokemón use various pop music, movies, and games as reference points, but only as a weird vehicle for their respective countries’ versions of white trash public sex, street racing, and drinking. Imagine the hicks from your area dressing up like Pokemón and engaging in bisexual sex at the park, and you get the picture. And then there are the body image cults like body modders, and their more style-conscious counterparts like Wannarexics and Guro Lolitas. Researching all these subcultures has left me feeling like an outcast amongst outcasts, which has been the story of my life; even when I was labeled a punk in the seventies, the punks didn’t like me. I hated beer and thought slam dancing was dumb, so I ended up being more like “Rudolph the Rednosed Punk”. So at this point in my life, and given this rather compelling diversity of subcultures, how could I lay claim to being anything other than an Otherkin? Read the rest of this entry »
What’s The Matter, Michigan?
[ Comments Off ]Posted on October 10, 2009 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Saturday, October 10th, 2009Michigan is a beautiful state with lots of resources, and is full of hard working people. So why don’t they just cheer up and get to work?
I live in Michigan. A state surrounded by the world’s largest fresh water lakes, with more than 11,000 inland lakes. The state is relatively rich with wildlife and natural resources, and the residents are known nationwide for their exceptional work ethic. So why is it that the state is number one in unemployment as of August, 2009? Why is it that the state’s largest city is known mostly for its urban decay? I have one guess: ATTITUDE. For some reason, the same character traits that give a Michigander a hard working, common sense attitude are easily flipped to the negative. Michigan’s sort of like a beetle. Almost indestructable and very industrious when things are right, but flip it on its back, and oh boy, forget it. I’ve had two experiences in the past year that highlighted this phenomena, and I still don’t understand it. But they’ve both re-invigorated my positivism. I’m proposing we start using the old saying “Michigan. America’s High Five To The World” as the tagline to get things rolling. One of these experiences was when the huge pharmaceutical conglomerate Pfizer closed its operations in the Ann Arbor area. It was psychological Armageddon for the locals. The economy was DOOMED. Until a short while later of course, when Google announced they were opening an office in the area. THE MESSIAH WAS ARRIVING. WE ARE SAVED! No-one paid much mind to the Read the rest of this entry »