My tweets
- Now that I'm a consultant at all my places of work, I feel both super-free and super...not sure. 19 mins ago
- @markwmann @ohheychristine But then they couldn't eventually rival Facebook in...something. Stupidity? I don't know. #ughping in reply to markwmann 2 hrs ago
- @brittneyholder You're evacuating?!?!? Oh no! If you need any help, beep out on the #boulderfire tag. Lots of people are standing by. :) in reply to brittneyholder 2 hrs ago
- What did iTunes 10 do with all the...color? 2 hrs ago
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Blog Archives
Blogroll
future Archive
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PBS Frontline – Digital Nation
Posted on September 6, 2010 | View Comments
- Are our brains changing?
“Over the past 20 years, the net has changed from a thing one does to the way one lives.” – Doug Rushkoff, Digital Nation
I made it a point to sit myself down for 90 full minutes and watch PBS Frontline’s “Digital Nation”. The video played in full-screen so that I couldn’t even see my various notifications pop up. Aside from one stray text message to my girlfriend, I even stayed off the phone. Given the subject matter at hand, I think that this is an entirely commendable thing, given that the digital native- HEY LOOK A FUNNY CAT VIDEO!!1! OMGZADORBZ!!
Read more on PBS Frontline – Digital Nation…
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Biosphere politics
Posted on February 12, 2010 | View CommentsJeremy Rifkin is blowing my mind today. Here’s a very tiny excerpt from his new book The Empathic Civilization:
For the Internet generation, “quality of life” becomes as important as individual opportunity in fashioning a new dream for the 21st century.
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Why I Like Sci-Fi
Posted on May 29, 2009 | View CommentsFound a neat little clip from Babylon 5 (you might remember it from back in the day – “our last, best hope for peace”) while ignoring my final for Modern Islamic Political Theory. I think it’s a great reminder of how diverse and interesting our planet is: -
Graduate School
Posted on May 29, 2009 | View CommentsA few months back, I read (with a somewhat horrified face) and commented on Penelope Trunk’s Brazen Careerist post “Don’t try to dodge the recession with grad school.” It’s a silly post, really, full of lovely little bits of wisdom like “Law school is a factory for depressives” or “Going to grad school is like going into the military.” I usually enjoy Penelope’s stuff, if for nothing else than her honest, self-effacing style. This post was different.My comments were less than supportive. Her gist was that graduate degrees require overinvestment of both money and time. Money, being tight in a recession, is pretty important. Time, according to her, can best be spent at other jobs, even those outside one’s experience or comfort level. We are reminded of people who try something different and in doing “figure out what they always wanted to do but didn’t know they wanted to do but can now do with their whole heart.” She recounts working on a French chicken farm and the non-traditional learning that she did while working in the coop. It helped her along her path.
I stand now at the end of two years of graduate school at a prestigious school and an even more prestigious program. I’m dozens of thousands of dollars in the hole. I couldn’t be happier.
When I completed a year-long resident fellowship after finishing my undergraduate work, I knew that my skillsets were incomplete. I needed to know how to do interesting things. I needed to meet interesting people. Something told me that graduate school would guide me. And it did – I’ve made some outstanding connections, professional and nonprofessional, that will serve me very well in the future. I’ve made friends. I coordinate fundraising and social media for a local humanitarian organization (as it turns out, I have a passion for international development). I can write grants and I know the social web pretty well. I have a job waiting for me in San Jose, CA where I’ll be working to eradicate malaria.
Did I spend two years well? Sure! Could I have done so more cheaply and still found my passion(s)? Certainly! Now I refer back to Penelope’s post and think even less of it. Graduate school shouldn’t be for everybody, but to come out and lambaste it (with plenty of support – check the comments) is shortsighted. I don’t know a single person who’s dodged the recession by furthering their education and networking, and I doubt that I ever will.
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Eradicating Malaria With the Tony Blair Faith Foundation
Posted on April 24, 2009 | View Comments
Hello web-friends,I have been appointed to my dream job and I need your help to make it rock.
I have been selected to join the Faiths Act Fellows, a cadre of 30 young interfaith leaders in the US, UK, and Canada who will spend August 2009-June 2010 working to promote malaria eradication. This is a brand-new program which will operate under the auspices of the Tony Blair Faith Foundation (yes, THAT Tony Blair) and the Interfaith Youth Core. It’s all fantastically exciting! I’ll be traveling to London at the end of July (farewell, Denver) for induction and training. Then it’s off to a malaria hotspot in Africa for on-the-ground work. We finish with training in Chicago. I report for duty to the Islamic Networks Group in San Jose, CA on October 1st. My job will be recruiting faith communities, and especially young people of faith, to work towards malaria eradication. Getting rid of this wicked mosquito-borne sickness can be done!
It goes without saying that I will utilize the fluid world of social media in order to reach these goals. I blog, tweet, and share most things, so this will be no different. I will be relying on my network (all of you) to help me spread the word and find kinds of people who can partner with me to get things done.
I’m short on the finer points and details, and for that I apologize. As a first order of business, I need to know ANYTHING about San Jose. My first ever trip to California is this Saturday when I attend the Nonprofit Technology Conference, so any advice/thoughts are welcome.
Post what you will, and send this one far and wide – the more, the merrier!
Read more on Eradicating Malaria With the Tony Blair Faith Foundation…
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Those Strange Happy Days (selfish post)
Posted on April 5, 2009 | View Comments
And there are mornings when, sitting in my chair by the window reading, in this case, an intellectual history of the birth of modern sociology, I’ll set my book down, take a sip of warm tea and breathe deeply (usually nag champa fumes) – everything goes crystalline.
I’ve often wondered if it’s some strange combination of “upper” hormones and sunlight, or if the post-rock Icelandic crooning that I’m listening to is somehow changing the way my mind orders priorities. In doing so, I’ve found that I don’t really care how it happens, how I can have these moments of stunningly happy clarity and sense of purpose. I do know that as I stand here typing this post, it takes every fiber of my being to not shout with joy and run outside toward the sun.
There’s nothing in my existence that suggests I lead anything less than a charmed life, and while there is always a part of me that says, “Stop talking so much about how happy you are!” the fact remains: Every day is an explosion.
Whew. I’ve got great friends, great family, pets (they live 900 miles away, sadly), my health, plenty of tea, and an overwhelming, perhaps uncomfortably, optimistic future-view.
I’m riding a smile-boat on an ocean of unicorns and stardust, and doing what I can to bring that feeling to those around me. Keep up the good work, everybody. We’re all in this together.
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Twitter: Training Wheels, Airbag, or Insurance?
Posted on March 22, 2009 | View Comments
I’m pursuing a number of job opportunities right now. If I’m hired, I might move away from Denver. I’m casting my net wide, so I’m not really sure where I might end up, but I know that before I get there, I’ll try to build up my Twitter network with local contacts – people who might be able to help me navigate the move and so on.
As I thought about how I could best leverage my current and future network, it occurred to me that we can look at Twitter in three distinct ways: as training wheels, as an airbag, or as insurance.
Training wheels – The world moves at about a million miles a second nowadays. It can be frustrating and time-consuming to enter the stream all at once without help. One of the much-touted uses of Twitter is helping people. We need to know where to go for Kindle support, or what kind of RAM our computers need, or even how to use Twitter itself. Other users can act as training wheels to help speed us along into the web and in real life.Airbag – Bad things happen. As an airbag, Twitter can help to insulate us against problems. Closely related to its use as training wheels, there are many ways that we’ve seen the community come together to help those in need, as it did when David Armano helped Daniela and her family. With many of our jobs in crisis, Twitter can be helpful for job-finders or even those seeking state and federal help to get by. An airbag is used to slow us down in an accident and prevent big hurts; Twitter, as a community of interesting and interested people, can be that airbag.
Insurance – Last but not least, we cannot ignore the power of microblogging to aid us in our most desperate…or our most powerful. Let me explain: Last April, a blogger tweeted about his arrest in Egypt. The message got out and so did he. Imagine witnessing a crime on a city street. Unable to stop the criminal, the best you can do is shoot out 140 characters describing his or her appearance. It’s a rough example, to be sure, and there’s no guarantee that it will necessarily help the situation, but at least it’s something. And in terms of power: a Twitter user snaps/uploads a Twitpic of an elected official engaging in questionable activity (let your mind wander). Boom! Lights out. Twitter in the hands of a disgruntled employee can also be wielded with frightful results, if that employee was so inclined.
Training wheels, airbag, or insurance. It can be one, all three, or none of these. How do you see Twitter?
Flickr photo from user kate at yr own risk
Read more on Twitter: Training Wheels, Airbag, or Insurance?…
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Because People Want To Know…
Posted on February 24, 2009 | View CommentsI happened upon an ABCNews story about Twitter that featured such luminaries as George Stephanopoulos and MC Hammer. I’ve got no idea how to post the damn thing in here, so I’ll just link out to it: John Berman catches up with MC Hammer about Twitter. John Berman (@abcdude) gave a pretty good rundown of Twitter, although I again got the feeling that microblogging was some sort of funny joke.Still, it got me to thinking. Mashable’s recent-ish article about Twitter’s growth is enough to make one’s head spin. 752%? That’s insance, but even with ~6 million users, the distinction between “user” and “USER” should be clear to anyone who has spent a few months tweeting. My curiosity is this: What is the “saturation point” for Twitter, i.e. when does it become normalized in much the same way that searching with Google or finding friends on Facebook has become blasé?
Is it going to be 15 million in the US? 40 million worldwide? When does Twitter use become so commonplace that we take it as a sine qua non of our online experience?
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What Comes Next?
Posted on January 26, 2009 | View CommentsI spend a lot of time wondering about “what comes next,” not so much to catch the wave, but to be inspired by what we might do in the future. Guy Kawasaki has an interview on the I Am Paddy blog about Twitter and business and connections. It’s an interesting read, but as I scrolled through it a week ago, the one question that caught my eye, and mind, was this: -
Social Magnetism: Gravity, Guys, and Gals
Posted on December 16, 2008 | View CommentsI spend a lot of time working on hypotheticals, constructing “what if” questions about the future. This is part of the curse of being a political science guy – it’s up to us to figure out what’s going to happen in the future (I say this to anger my historian friends – Drew, that’s for you). So in my latest WHAT IF, I thought about what might happen if someone quite famous, say Al Pacino or @Kofi Annan were to hop on Twitter tonight.I refer to @THE_REAL_SHAQ to further my what if. The guy tweeted for the first time back on November 18th, largely to tell the world that he was, in fact, the real Shaq. That’s less than a month ago. As of right now, he’s being followed by 21,356 people. That’s insane. Once we get enough case study data, I’m sure we’ll be able to chart exactly how quickly big names expand their follower count. So let’s say that Pacino hops on Twitter tonight and starts tweeting about whatever strikes his fancy. Within a few days he will have thousands of followers. We know that this happens, but it can’t be just as simply as celebrity worship. I follow @Ban Ki-moon, but I’m more interested in what the Secretary General of the UN is up to than merely curious about a big name’s daily plans.
In much the same fashion, once someone creates an especially engaging blog post/article (more than likely a list!), it circulates wildly throughout the social web. If we’re not keeping up with ourselves, it is almost impossible to figure out where our content ends up. People will cut it up, give credit where credit is due, and repost, retweet, and reshare it ad infinitum. It’s like casting a satellite out into space. Even if you point it in one specific direction, it’s still going to be affected by the gravitational pulls of other objects, i.e. stars, asteroids, planets. Its course will be determined by the larger (and smaller) bodies that inhabit space. In the social web, the role of gravity and social magnetism cannot be ignored. If we don’t pay attention, we may end up floating out into the social web alone.