Broadcasting Brain

There’s a powerful, useful way to draw attention to your words.  Just define who your arch-enemy is and then start unloading with both barrels.  Continue the relentless assault.  If you’re lucky, your arch-enemy is one of the undead and just keeps getting back up.  Then you knock him (or her) down again, inflicting mortal damage.  And then they get back up again and…  you both win, because everyone loves a good fight.

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

If you're new here, welcome! Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed to stay up to date with my latest posts and articles. Thanks for visiting!

This will probably turn out to be a stream-of-consciousness ramble about various things.  EDIT:  this post is written in a satirical/sarcastic style, so it shouldn’t be taken too, too seriously.  OK?

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.

There’s an interesting political issue in my home province that is seeing some use of social media.  It’s making an interesting case study.  Given the overlap between a relevant political issue and the use of social technology, I think that this is a case study worth following.

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!)

At the moment I’m pondering a situation happening in my home province.  I don’t want to get into too much detail about it at the moment because there are few specifics.  It boils down to our provincial government (think state government if you live in the US, Australia, or some other similar government structure) planning to announce a decision that will potentially be unpopular with many residents of our province.  This decision will affect every single resident of this province. This is the type of government decision that could bring about a big change in the status quo and changing the playing field in our province for generations.

This is a big deal.

Or not. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m of two minds about one of Merlin Mann’s latest videos (disclosure:  I’m a big fan of Merlin’s ever since he answered one of my questions on CBC’s Spark Radio show and he commented on my blog.  Well, before then, too.  But a little attention goes a long way, what can I say?)

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.

The blogosphere is dead and its your fault, screams the post’s headline.  But did that actually happen a long time ago?  And was it ever real?

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.

Read the rest of this entry »