Author Archive

I don’t usually pay much attention to advertisements—billboards, television spots, print ads—but when I’m driving, I often listen to the radio (when I don’t throw on an old Nirvana cassette), and besides tuning in to college and public stations, there’s no good way to avoid listening to adverts. And like on television, they often repeat during every commercial break. Nonetheless, it took me several listens and a contextual conversation to make the connection I’m about to describe.

A recent Bochner Eye Institute radio spot says something like, “We know you could pay less for eye surgery, but why would you? You’ve only got one pair of eyes.” (If anyone can point me to a recording of the advert, let me know.)

What they’re saying is clear: by using an eye surgeon or service that charges less, you’re putting your eyes at greater risk of complications or worse. They are trusting that consumers will pay a premium for a service that offers better quality and lower risk. It’s a long-term scheme: pay more now and worry less later.

The same argument applies to many consumer products and services: you can pay more for a better car and (hopefully) it will have lower maintenance and fuel costs down the road; you can pay more up front for a better new home and it is less likely to sink into the ground; you can pay more for quality clothes and they will last longer and maybe even remain in fashion.

It’s a risky game, presenting these arguments to consumers in the age of convenience and cost-consciousness, but it must appeal to enough of us that some companies continue to employ it. I think it’s especially effective for cars and homes, and occasionally effective for luxury or semi-premium items, like watches and dishes. But it’s mostly ineffective for more everyday items, like clothes and furniture, and it’s very ineffective in the face of competing campaigns from fast and convenience food companies.

But back to the eyes: they are an integral part of the body, providing probably the most important sense in our visually over-stimulated culture. In this sense, they are us, and without them, we are nothing. I suppose I’ve answered my own question here, but still: if this type of advertising does work (if only in relation to certain products or services with recognizably high value, why doesn’t it work with respect to environmental concerns?

I think (I guess it’s just hope, really) it’s clear to pretty much everyone that our environment is more truly beneficial than our eyes or any other body part a person could lose without dying. That is, without our environment, we are truly nothing.

Is it that environmentally focussed organizations and companies haven’t tried this line of argument? I don’t think this is true. Do they just not have enough money to get their message out to enough people? Possibly. Is it that we simply value the environment so little, or that we are incapable of seeing the value? Maybe they’re up against a short-term culture with a mindset that is just too fixed to change. Have we made ourselves disposable, and therefore not worth spending premium money on, like we would for a fancy car?

Tell me dear readers: why do people choose the cheap and low-quality product over the one that might last a life time or longer?

-Adam

I’m not quite sure where I stand on the phenomenon of location-aware applications. (I’m sure you’ve noticed that Foursquare is the hot one at the moment.) I find geo-tagging interesting; it’s the sort of thing that I want to use to build pre- and post-apocalyptic fantasies. But marking a spot with useful or neat info, and letting others know you were there, is different from letting people know exactly where you are now. Well, I think so anyway.

I see the value of letting friends or acquaintances know where you are at a given time: you can increase the likelihood of “chance” rendez-vous, and it adds an element of hyper-modern fun or adventure to our hyper-tech lives. It tries to put the social back in social networking.

I think of location-awareness as a sort of antidote to the separation that social networking brings on, whether it actually works or not. I’ve mentioned before that I now spend far more time at my computer than ever before, which, besides its other effects, makes me feel like I’m missing out on being social, even when I’m engaging in conversations on Facebook, Twitter, and whatever other forum. By letting others on my networks know where I am when I do get away from the new boob tube, I can at least feel like I’m being a bit more “real” social. Well, I don’t precisely do this. At least not via a specific location-aware application. Occasionally I’ll mention on Twitter where I am or where I’m going (usually obliquely), and I guess I’m not sure exactly why I do that.

Anyway, at the moment, I hardly go anywhere except for home and work, so my location posts would be excessively dull!

There’s a dark side to all of this sharing though. Just as identity thieves can mine social networking sites and the world wide web in general for personal information to recreate private identities and do all kinds of bad stuff, enterprising thieves might use personal location information to determine when a person is and is not at home and when she is likely to return: the perfect opportunity—practically an invitation—to steal. That’s kind of the premise of Please Rob Me, a website that uses Foursquare data from Twitter to inform the world when people are away from their homes, and thus supposedly when those homes are ripe for a’robbin’. (Really, their goal is “to raise some awareness on this issue [of privacy] and have people think about how they use services like Foursquare, Brightkite, Google Buzz etc. Because everybody can get this information.”)

I’m not an alarmist when it comes to this sort of thing, but I do believe that identity thieves are out there, and I’m sure that somewhere someone is in fact nefariously collecting information on social networkers’ whereabouts. I don’t think those are necessarily reasons to stop using Twitter or foursquare; just think smart and be safe, okay?

On the other hand, I think Blippy is one of the worst things I’ve ever heard of. The site updates your status, like Twitter, with every purchase you make on your credit card. And sane people volunteer to share this information with the world. This seems to me to a shockingly shallow intentional expression of private information. (And I’m not going to provide a hyperlink, because I don’t think you should bother visiting the site.) People used to say that Twitter was narcissistic, but Blippy has no other purpose than to gloat over one’s consumption. There’s little more narcissistic than that. Barbara Kiviat writes in Time Magazine that the idea of posting every credit card purchase might shame people into spending less, but one of the website’s co-founders, Philip Kaplan, points to an opposite trend: spending more so that the world knows all the cool stuff you’re buying and doing. Kiviat herself finds the urge to spend more rising within her after using Blippy for a while. Ugh!

When we look at social networking tools in isolation, it’s difficult to see the harm that they might cause, but these tools don’t exist in isolation, especially not now. I think it should be clear enough that releasing important private information can lead to bad things without the many warnings about doing it, but the warnings are there, and the problems will only get deeper the more information we choose to share.

Where will all of this private disclosure lead? What are the advantages? Do they outweigh the potential pitfalls? I could pretty much talk about this for hours, but I’ll let you chime in for a minute…

—Adam

Talking with my friend Mike Kennedy recently, I realized that social media have invaded my job. My personal and professional lives are colliding!

Blogging and reading blogs have become part of my job description, and there are small Twitter and Facebook communities among my co-workers (including me) and higher-ups. I talk to my boss on Twitter—weird. These things used to be solely personal pursuits—stuff for friends and family. Now I do them at work? Yuck!?

I’m sure this is nothing new to many of BlogCampaigning’s readers, but it was a bit of a shock to me, and I’m still not sure how I feel about it. I’m happy that my company has started a blog and that I get to write for it. I think it’s great that we’re actively, if tentatively, pursuing a social media strategy. I’ve even written some posts on how social media affects the workplace (we’re in human resources publishing, so you know).

I think my surprise arises from an artificial barrier that I had built dividing The Internet and its Many Diversions and Modes of Communication including Social Media, from E-Mail and Proprietary Closed Systems and their Singular Purpose of Doing My Job. What I mean is that I previously thought The Internet was for leisure, and one only used it occasionally for work. But in an instant, I recognized that this was far from the truth, and I was thus in some sort of work-leisure limbo. (It’s clear now that this realization was building for some time.)

So what now!?

I don’t really have a problem with social media entering my job. In hindsight, that was clearly inevitable. This episode has just made me realize that I will now have to deal with all of the mixed-up things that come next: delineating work time from leisure; maintaining a professional web presence; managing the time I am working…

I guess the question is: does this situation even really change anything?

Sure, that barrier has fallen down, but does that mean my behaviour or life will change? I don’t know the answer to that yet.

— Update —

I think I might have figured it out. The thing is, I already spend a lot time at the computer; I don’t like that it has intruded into so many daily functions. If I want to read the news, I go to my computer. If I want to see what my friends are up to or talk to them, I go to my computer. If I want to listen to music or look at photos—computer. If I want to write—computer. Recipes, directions, phone calls, videos, communication… You can probably guess that I don’t have a Blackberry or iPhone or some other piece of fancy portable gear. Maybe that’s my trouble but I’m not sure.

I have two problems with spending so much time at my computer: guilt and headaches. On the one hand, it just doesn’t feel right staring at a digital screen for as long as I do each day; on the other, I feel unhealthy doing it. You could say, “Get a Wii Fit!” But I’m pretty sure that’s missing the point. I want to do all of those leisure activities, but I don’t want to sit in one spot all day, staring into the bright light, to do them. I want to leave my house!

So I wonder, what is the solution? Am I just waiting for the right technology to come along to allow me to do all of the things I want to without feeling like I’m attached to a machine? Do I want to give up technology altogether? Let me tell you when summer comes around.

Now that you’ve learned all about the most basic function of Twitter (communication) from my previous post…

I actually started that post because I wanted to talk about using Twitter as a human-powered search engine, but I got to talking about the basics and soon enough I realized that if I wrote any more I was going to get boring. So here is a post dedicated entirely to Twitter as search engine.

2. Human-powered internet search (in real time!)

So, after using Twitter for a couple of months, and asking mostly rhetorical questions here and there with little response (I had few followers in those early days), I finally discovered the value of direct searching for useful info on Twitter—as opposed to simply scanning my feed for interesting stuff. Which is to say, I finally received a worthwhile response to a question.

The question: Anybody out there writing a serial Twitter novel yet?

I received a response quickly enough, and I didn’t have to sort through dozens or hundreds of irrelevant search results to find what I was looking for. The simple answer to the query is “yes”, and the detailed answer is, “Yes, in fact, there are at least two serialized novels being published exclusively on Twitter at the moment. They are: ‘Fuel Dump‘ and ‘Joy Motel‘.”

As soon as I saw the answer, I realized what probably many thousands discovered before me. But imagine: wouldn’t Google be amazing if every search received a response based on a real persons’ knowledge, ideally more than one person’s—many more—but regardless… Twitter has that power.

Since then, I’ve asked questions to catch up on Coronation St. a couple of times when I’ve missed a week here and there; I’ve asked for help using Twitter itself; I’ve tried to unload my old stuff (turns out Craigslist is still better for this purpose), and others’ stuff; I’ve looked for health answers and work answers and business reviews.

I don’t always get the answers I’m seeking, but I usually start some conversation, which often offers up something else I’m after.

Asking your audience questions is a common tactic that bloggers use, so it’s no surprise that it works with micro-blogging. Controversial questions are even better than regular ones, especially in the brevity that Twitter offers (try @nowtoronto http://bit.ly/nJNjE Who doesn’t like Little Girls?).

I’ve used Twitter as a search engine in two ways: 1) by asking questions of my followers, and anyone to whom they care to pass on the question, 2) by using Twitter’s own search power to exploit the thing’s millions of users. I can simply enter a term into Twitter’s search function, like “Stephen Harper” if I want to know what Canadians are saying about their prime minister, or “TTC” if I want to know what’s happening on Toronto’s transit system. Or I might want to know what fans are saying about my fave TV shows, True Blood and Mad Men. Or maybe I’m planning a trip somewhere exotic and I want to see what people are saying about St. Maarten or Costa Rica.

Once I see the results of those searches, I’ll inevitably come across hashtags (like “#cdnpoli” for Canadian politics or “ttcu” for Toronto Transit Commission updates). Hashtags have a number of uses, but in general what they do is gather tweets on a particular topic or from a particular group so readers can find information easily. Taking the above tags as examples, instead of searching for the TTC in general, if I want to know what’s happening on the TTC right now, I can click the #ttcu tag and instantly find out about delays, detours, and shuttles on the system. Or if I see the #cdnpoli tag, I can find what the top general political stories in Canada are right now, rather than those related only to Mr. Harper.

Of course, you can also peek at True Blood, or find out what the Twitter world is listening to. And you might find more information about your exotic destination with the #CostaRica tag than with the search term “Costa Rica”.

I feel like I’ve gone on too long again!

Anyway, you’re an imaginative person, and don’t let me tell you how to use Twitter. Why don’t you tell me how you use it?

Recently I wrote a post for BlogCampaigning on my experience transitioning from a vinyl DJ to a laptop DJ, which, from personal comments, appears to have been generally well received. But the only comment anyone actually posted on the blog was quite negative and passively critical. Initially, I wanted to tell the semi-anonymous commenter where to go, but I decided to take the high road, thanking the fellow for his post and offering a very brief apologetic response.

I was wrong. I’ve thought about it, and I now recognize that that person’s comment was uninformed and thoughtless, and I had no reason to apologize. I don’t want to insult him, and I hope this response doesn’t simply come off as petty. I have a far more appropriate response in mind, and it is basically a brief description of the nature of entertainment media today.

In his passive-aggressive note, the commenter appears to make three points:

1. DJs who use iTunes (or similar software) don’t deserve to entertain club or bar crowds.
2. Whatever happened to DJs who can match beats by simply listening to songs (as opposed to using software to digitally and automatically beat-match)?
3. DJs today suck.

Where to begin?

First, the nature of DJing has changed completely in recent years, and “disc jockeying” is basically an anachronism in the same way as “film processing” or “going to print”. With digital music collections advancing far faster than physical collections, and the ease of collecting and transporting digital music, it should be no surprise that DJs are turning to software solutions. And now, there are hardware solutions, as well, to replace bulky turntables and CD players. Everyone who wants to be a DJ has already got a laptop. A DJ starting out now would almost be a fool to choose physical media over virtual. As for iTunes, well, as I said in my original post, it’s not good for DJing, and it’s not appropriate for DJing, but in a pinch, which is where I found myself on that night, it will perform the required function.

What software or hardware one chooses to use, however, is basically irrelevant—a simple matter of pleasure or circumstance. I started DJing on a kit hobbled together from whatever bits of stereo equipment my friends, Josh and James, and I had at home—and later some rented gear. Even when MP3s came around, I only used them to create mixes that I could play on CD decks. But if the software existed at the time, I almost certainly would have chosen to use a laptop over CDs. (Vinyl is always a special case.) The only relevant question is: how well does the DJ entertain the crowd?

So, complain all you want, but this mode of DJing is just the way it is and will be. Frankly, these days I’d be more surprised to see a DJ using turntables at a club than using a laptop—with or without some extra hardware.

(I’m not saying I fully approve of the rise of the laptop DJ. As with photography, and journalism, and any other medium that has found itself in a similar situation, not everyone who performs as a DJ deserves to call themselves a DJ. There is a core skill set that one must develop, and no software or hardware can allow a person to bypass that process. No doubt many DJs today never bother to acquire those skills; but this has ever been the case.)

The other thing is that the digital revolution has caused a tsunami of DJs, just as it has turned everyone into a photographer, and a web designer, and an illustrator, and a journalist, and a media expert, and so on. There’s more to this: I don’t want to get into the details, but the expanding middle class has somehow achieved a sort of critical nexus of leisure time and disposable income that practically compels their young to go to bars and clubs and dance. In Toronto, at least, new bars, clubs, and restaurants open all the time and everywhere. Each one of them needs to entertain their clientele—ideally at a low cost—and more than ever now the common factor is the DJ.

More venues + more leisure time and money = more DJs

Unfortunately, as I touched on above—and in this I agree with the commenter—more DJs doesn’t mean more quality. In fact, it almost definitely means lower quality overall; but it doesn’t simply mean that all laptop DJs are awful or that the club owner has hired his inexperienced cousin who just downloaded some trial software and wants to give it a go. There are certainly many experienced and skilled DJs who use (and choose) computers over traditional DJ gear.

You know what, I’m not even ashamed to say that I have played a song here and there from YouTube when I haven’t found it in my collection. I would never do this in a club or bar with a high-quality sound system, but for a private party or a standard bar night, why not? If you can mix it and make it fit, and it sounds good, that is really the only issue.

You’ll probably be better off paying attention to what music the DJ is playing and how well she does it, rather than the gear she is using. If you find it still doesn’t live up to your standards, you can always try your hand at DJing yourself.

Thanks for your comment.

I’ve been using Twitter now for a few months, and I still have little idea of it’s purpose—or if it even has one. At it’s base, Twitter is a simple way to share and receive bits of information, the modern currency. It’s like a data marketplace—a microcosm of the internet itself, and more manageable than the world wide web. But I like that it has undefined boundaries, and that users have come up with new uses for it.

I don’t go out of my way to read about Twitter’s development on technology blogs or whatever. I have my interests (technology and internet culture among them), and I read about them semi-regularly; but I don’t have the time or the interest to consume or sort through all of the blather, opinion, and predictions about something like Twitter, which I would prefer to explore myself.

That said, here are a few of the ways in which Twitter has changed my internet and information consumption behaviour.

1. Interest-targeted information
I never had a selection of specific blogs that I would visit regularly to find news on a certain topic. I retrieved stuff from the internet mostly via news sites (e.g., TheStar.com), search engines, and aggregators (e.g., Digg and Reddit), each of which serves a particular purpose for finding information. Google news was my main news source for a brief while a couple of years ago. I also began using Google Reader to follow with pitiful—make that pathetic—regularity my friends’ blogs.

These all might have their own purposes, but I found them inefficient because they forced me to visit a website and scan through bits of info for what I wanted to read. I had heard of RSS feeds, which could send interesting links directly to a central location, such as your e-mail or a web application like Google Reader, but I was too lazy to bother figuring it out, and besides, Facebook had captured most of my internet attention; and with Facebook, I could share information as well as receive it.

This was all before Twitter. I looked at Twitter last year some time and thought, like just about everyone else on the planet (that’s facetious western arrogance, by the way): “What is this nonsense? Who cares about what everybody/nobody has to say about their nonsense lives?” I hardly realized that millions were already paying attention to others’ nonsense on Facebook all day long. But Twitter just seemed too simple and pointless: why would anyone actually want to know about what others were doing or, you know, thought about stuff?

Well, I was wrong. I mean, I still don’t care about what most people are doing or what they think about stuff—my use of Twitter has actually made this abundantly clear. I also note that recently (even before Twitter) I’ve been using Facebook far less than in the past. The thing is, now I can “follow” “twitterers” who “tweet” information in which I am interested, as well as my friends—those who are currently taking advantage of the service—and all of that information goes to one central place, where I can scan it with far greater ease than before.

For example, I used to visit Digg, which aggregates user-submitted stories from the web, placing the top stories (by users’ votes) on the “front page”. This is incredibly useful, but the content is still all over the place. Current events and world politics are combined in an unholy mixture with pictures of cute animals, celebrity “news” and UFO and crop circle sightings, and eventually, I found myself disillusioned with sifting through all of the stuff I wasn’t interested in. As for friends’ blogs, as I mentioned, I simply didn’t look at them very often, probably because I was spending my online time scanning Digg.

Twitter allows me to narrow the scope of my information retrieval. I follow certain news sources and blogs that mainly focus on local (i.e., Toronto) news, for example:

Torontoist for general Toronto news, mostly written by local independent journalists
BlogTO for more general news
NOW Magazine for the “alternative” news
Urban Toronto) for a great look at Toronto’s history and future

Some of my other interests are satisfied via:

The Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project
Tech news, commonly involving Google at myunblinkingeye
News about all the good food we produce in Ontario from Foodland Ontario

I follow friends (including the writers of BlogCampaigning):

Justin Broadbent, a terrific artist, illustrator, photographer, and videographer
Angie Johnson, fashion designer and Montréal boutique owner extraordinaire
Tyson Bodnarchuk, another terrific artist and Montréal boutique owner extraordinaire

And I even follow the odd celebrity:
Neil Gaiman, writer of fantasy and science fiction
Rainn Wilson (kind of), via his “big questions” blog, Soul Pancake

I could go on, but I fear that I’m already pushing the boundaries of attention, and will raise the ire of my fellow blogcampaigners with my first post.

So, to wrap up: maybe you’re not an information junkie to the extent that I am, but if you use the internet to seek useful or interesting information for personal or professional use, and you find you’re not satisfied with your current methods, I recommend you give Twitter a try. It’s not difficult to understand and use, and it should be even easier for people who are already somewhat social-media savvy.

Let me know if you’ve got questions. I probably won’t be able to answer them, but I’d like to hear them!

Upcoming:
Twitter as human-powered search engine—the new (better) Google!?
Twitter as hyper-modern communication tool—not just for nerds!