Paris Hilton’s Video Response to McCain

This is too funny and clever! It’s called Paris Hilton Responds to McCain Ad on FunnyOrDie.com.

Online Trolls Haunt the Internet

I’d heard and basically understood the term “troll” for a long time, but this long NYT magazine article, The Trolls Among Us, provided an enlightening look at the underside of human behavior with technology. Here’s the article’s definition of “troll“:

In the late 1980s, Internet users adopted the word “troll” to denote someone who intentionally disrupts online communities.

Here’s a glimpse of how this aberrant community thinks:

clipped from www.nytimes.com “Lulz” is how trolls keep score. A corruption of “LOL” or “laugh out loud,” “lulz” means the joy of disrupting another’s emotional equilibrium. “Lulz is watching someone lose their mind at their computer 2,000 miles away while you chat with friends and laugh,” said one ex-troll who, like many people I contacted, refused to disclose his legal identity. The author interviews and stays with several prominent trolls, showing what they are like in person as opposed to the way they act online. While that is interesting on one level, I liked more the exploration of what the prevalence of trolls says about human beings and society. For example: clipped from www.nytimes.com Does free speech tend to move toward the truth or away from it? When does it evolve into a better collective understanding? When does it collapse into the Babel of trolling, the pointless and eristic game of talking the other guy into crying “uncle”? Is the effort to control what’s said always a form of censorship, or might certain rules be compatible with our notions of free speech?

Jellyfish Invasions

I remember being terrified of jellyfish when I was a small child, but I don’t think I ever actually was stung by one. This NYT article about the dramatic increase in jellyfish along shorelines around the world is worrisome not just from a tourism standpoint. When nature sends us a message as loud as this one, we’d better listen. There’s no simple answer, of course — there never is to big problems.

Let’s just add it to the long list of daunting challenges we are facing these days…

clipped from www.nytimes.com “These jellyfish near shore are a message the sea is sending us saying, ‘Look how badly you are treating me,’” said Dr. Josep-Mara Gili, a leading jellyfish expert, who has studied them at the Institute of Marine Sciences of the Spanish National Research Council in Barcelona for more than 20 years. The explosion of jellyfish populations, scientists say, reflects a combination of severe overfishing of natural predators, like tuna, sharks and swordfish; rising sea temperatures caused in part by global warming; and pollution that has depleted oxygen levels in coastal shallows.

Google’s Knol - A Unit of Knowledge

A colleague of mine, Manfred Criegee-Rieck, pointed out that Google has launched a new website called Knol. A “knol” is defined there as “a unit of knowledge.” Experts are invited to contribute content by “writing a knol” on any topics they wish.

It’s a Wikipedia-like effort, but with experts-only as authors. I don’t see it as a direct competitor to Wikipedia, because Wikipedia can simply reach into Knol to tap into its knowledge, just as it does every other valuable resource. By definition, an encyclopedia encompasses all knowledge available, so there could well develop a symbiotic relationship between Knol and Wikipedia.

And since Knol is part of Google,

Obama’s Grand Tour

I’ve gotten weary of the presidential race, and too busy with other things to follow it much for a while, or even to care. But I enjoyed Maureen Dowd’s wry, mocking wit in her column this morning: “Is ‘The One’ Cocky or Commander in Chiefy?“
I love that McCain’s aides call Obama “The One,” thinking they are cleverly sarcastic in their reference to Keanu Reeves’ character in The Matrix. Yet it’s telling how true the characterization rings. I immediately thought, “Yes, that’s what this feels like. Just like in the movie when more and more little things fall in place to gradually convince you that, indeed, this guy is ‘the one’ destined to save us.”

Of course, we’re not in a movie and Obama is no messiah, but there is something of that air about him. He just seems so different from every politician who has come before him that you can’t help wondering if there isn’t some greater force at work.

OK, I’ll stop indulging in fantastic thinking now and go back to ignoring the presidential contest.

clipped from www.nytimes.com The media behemoth slouching after the senator is scouring his every word, expression, bead of sweat, basketball shot and accessory — are those hiking boots too Bremer? Are the sunglasses too rapper? Will he leave enough time for his glittery groupie, Carla Bruni? — for hints of imperfection that would foretell lacunae in presidential judgment.

What’s an Online Community Organizer Do?

Perfect clip for me to post and share, since I am now a Wiki Community Manager, which is another name for online community organizer. Not only is this Fast Wonder Blog post useful, but Seth Godin is always worth reading. If you want to learn more about this emerging role/career, both posts are good places to start.

Over time, I hope this blog will become another good resource for learning about the online community organizer role, as I will be posting about my experience, and my learning curve, going forward.

clipped from fastwonderblog.com Seth Godin recently called the Online Community Organizer role a Job of the Future. This brings me to the most common question: “What exactly do you do?” I see the online community manager role as having several key elements: ongoing facilitation, content creation, evangelism, and community evolution. There are certainly many more tasks, but I suspect that 90% of the work falls into one of these four very broad categories.

One Blog or Specialized Blogs?

I started this blog just to get started blogging. I had wanted to blog for years, but one thing after another held me back, not the least of which was fear that I would not keep up with it. Blogs that aren’t updated regularly aren’t really blogs, IMHO. I didn’t want to set something up that I could not commit to and write in frequently.

So, one decision I made was to let this blog include any and all content I felt like blogging about. I know people who have different blogs for different kinds of content. That makes sense, and if you’re trying to build traffic to your blog it’s probably best to be targeted in what you write about, so readers interested in that content will find your blog valuable.

But I’m not doing this for the website traffic and I couldn’t commit to keeping up with more than one blogs, such as one about work topics and one about things of personal interest to me. So I made this blog a blend that reflects all of me — all of my interests, whether professional or personal, the serious and the silly, the carefully considered and the random tidbits. I’ve decided I like it this way.

Now, my career has changed direction and blogging is suddenly part of my official job,

Summer Wind - NYT

I liked this story, Summer Wind. It’s calming, peaceful, and evokes images of the rural lifestyle it describes. It’s a vignette, really, not a story, article or column. Just a quick view of a place in time, nicely-written and conveying the appeal that the rural lifestyle has for the author.

Here’s a glimpse:

For the past few hours, the wind has been rising and falling, the precursor of a storm coming in from the west. When the wind climbs, a kind of elation blows through the house — it’s the hushing sound of the leaves outside and the way the breeze sweeps the floors and lifts the curtains and slams the doors. The dogs snap to and look around when it gusts. And when the wind drops, it seems to drop us — the dogs and me — into the trough of an ordinary summer day.

I’m loving the rural lifestyle, myself, here in my cottage on a horse farm. It’s nice out here

Blog Fatigue

Sorry I have not been posting much here recently. I’ve plunged into my new job, and that includes blogging for my company internally. I’ve lost track of how many posts I have created there, but the last thing I really want to do at the moment is blog here, too, at the end of a very long day.

So, apology and excuse offered, I’m shutting down and getting out of the house.

I’m Tired of “A Perfect Storm”

OK, I’m going to expose my English-major roots here, not to mention my first career as an English teacher. I am tired of hearing and seeing “a perfect storm” used to describe a rare confluence of factors that produces a negative result. It was a pretty cool phrase when the usage began, inspired by the powerful book and movie, The Perfect Storm. It was a concise and visual way to make a point about, essentially, really bad luck causing a really bad result.

But is *everything* negative that results from multiple factors really worthy of the label, “a perfect storm”? I think not. Instead, it’s a lazy way to explain complicated causal relationships. We don’t have to actually provide any explanation of cause and effect, let alone