Ghost town (Photo credit: NixBC)

If we keep on comparing everything to Facebook we are forgetting that people are the objects that create the community. Each community from Facebook to G+ to Pinterest to all the others we interact with, we have created those communities. Each one has its place, and each community is like visiting the different communities in the cities we live in. We have our China Towns, our downtown districts, our parks, and neighborhoods and other places we interact with.

Facebook feels like a major downtown district, it is Times Square; everyone goes there at least once in their lives if they can afford it and gawks at the tall edifices that companies and other people have built around their reputations. It is so noisy so chaotic, that we can easily become overwhelmed with the experience.

Google Plus feels more like the arts district, it is our own Freemont Seattle, pictures, books, arts, creativity, and places to hang out and talk about esoteric things with your friends over coffee. It is brilliant in its own way, and while devoid of hipsters, G+ is a thriving dynamic arts community that we can go visit, see beautiful things, and be inspired.

Pinterest has ended up being our fashion district, or our place for personal inspiration, and sometimes a place for our darker thoughts about our self-image, our self-esteem, our place in the world in relationship to who we interact with. It is our place for darker secrets to be exposed by what we idealize ourselves to be, or who we want to be from body image to cooking to shoes.

MySpace has become the run down tenement district filled with dark corners, advertising at its basest level, it is our place to take a look at those who are less fortunate, maybe find people who are living on the darker side of the planet. It is our ghetto, our place to go gawk at the natives and wonder what will become of them later on in life. It is like a dark jazz club in 1930’s Harlem, people go, but lord knows you do not want to be photographed there.

Instagram is our scrap book; it is a place where we drop our memories from where we are, regardless of what we think we are doing. It is food, people, places, snapshots of our lives in ways that no other neighborhood can be. It is our place to push our memories, events, people, and places, things, where we are now, now now, not five seconds ago now. It is our box of memories that we tuck under the virtual bed and sometimes look at and smile thinking how much fun it was to be there.

That is what makes all the discussion around G+ being a ghost town, or indeed anything else being a ghost town. We miss the vibrant communities that have been built up around our personalities. We do not look at them as if they were districts in one big community like Seattle, or even a global community. We have our hucksters, our get rich quick people, and our people standing on street corners with baggies of items that will put your brain into altered states of consciousness. We have all that, and these are the communities that have been built up by the user base.

Some are darker and seedier than others, but if we look at the social landscape as districts in a city, or provinces in a country then we are going to realize that each one of these social communities, even Twitter all serve a purpose, they serve a neighborhood, they serve an area with the things that those who have built the communities feel are important. Ghost town or no, each one has carved a special place in their member’s hearts and minds, and if we deal with each of these communities like the unique expressions of who we are when we are visiting the area, then we can forget about the “ghost town” effect.

We all built this on the software that companies thought would be cool, it is time to start realizing that we have built multiple dynamic communities, just like we build neighborhoods in our cities.

Just some random thoughts on Occupy Seattle for May Day 2012. I have to admit this is the first time that anyone has ever called me an exploitative pig because I was out there taking pictures of the event. But I really seemed to have ticked off one of the members of the group, but I also do not think that she was a core member of the group either. I think she was a hanger, someone who was just there for whatever political reason that this person could think of.

Photographers are out there to record events, at times there were more photographers than protesters or police. This could have ended up being really interesting because of all the professional news crews that were on site and getting between the protesters and the police.

I am very disappointed that violence ensued.

Occupy needs a better message than “everything for everyone”, that will not work here. Really what they need is a message that is more back to basics, incorporating a sense of fair play and playing by the rules. A sense of fair play will be the only way for Occupy to win over people.

There has to be a respectable side to occupy, calling photographers capitalist exploiters really isn’t what we are looking for here. We need to see more business people, more leaders, more teachers, more middle class, and more average Americans in the mix that are supporting the cause with money, time, energy, and other methods of support. The way that occupy has set itself up now as a fringe element, filled with anarchists and unwashed crazy people will not get this going anywhere. The Tea Party is no less insane than Occupy, but because it is made up of middle class and old Americans who are living in a dreamland of the perfect 1950’s it has some street cred.

Occupy desperately needs respectable street cred, less crazy, less anarchists, more regular Americans. No matter how loathsome that idea is to occupy, they need a varnish of respectability.

Occupy knows how to spell, that is very good in light of the illiterate signs held up by the Tea Party people at their various rallies.

Occupy is an interesting use of protest, culture, mixed media, but all of this is being spent in random ways without a series of goals or targets that people could rally around. Rather the energy and enthusiasm is being spent randomly without any goal in mind. There is no “occupy platform” or other way for people to rally and incorporate Middle America into the mix.

They need better slogans, one that hit a meme that appeals to a broad range of Americans.

Occupy needs to be less scary.

Occupy is meaningless protest without form or format.

In all the Seattle May Day protests were interesting, exciting, and overall enjoyable except for the crazy lady on the bench who decided to go insane. The pictures I took of the event are the most discussed most liked most shared pictures I have ever taken in my life. That alone was worth the trip. If occupy can be channeled, focused, funded, and reduce the amount of crazy people, it might be a good third or fourth party in the USA. Without focus though, it is just random groups of people protesting anything for any reason, and while interesting, politically impotent.

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On the Political side of the fence this morning is a report that in the oral arguments before the Supreme Court, The Republicans have posted a video on YouTube, and are airing it on TV that shows Solicitor General Donald Verrilli stumble over words, with the idea that “Obamacare is a hard sell”. Regardless of what we think of the actual

WASHINGTON - NOVEMBER 19: Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-CT)(L), Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) (2nd-L), and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) (R), participate in a news conference on health care on Capitol Hill on November 19, 2009 in Washington, DC. The news conference was held to discuss the The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that is before the Senate. (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

argument, there has been a problem with “spin” lately.

It is getting very hard to tell the truth about anything.

We have entered the screaming phase of yellow journalism, and as we continue on with the silly season in politics, when we desperately need to be told the truth, just the facts, we end up with spin. We end up with some marketing idea of what we need to know. We are exposed to more spin, more fear, and in many ways the marketing and information process makes the argument we are all doomed if we keep on going the way we are going. There were the same things under almost every president we have. We work out a way to make the two opposing candidates “the other” we demonize them, we try to cast them as against society and everything that “America stands for”.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

This is the kind of video that simply shows how far we have come in relationship to spin, and as Bloomberg and others have reported, it is doctored. This is not an authentic video, this is not an authentic recording, and is the base of misinformation in politics. Now the bad part is that while we have some people reporting that it is doctored, we don’t know for sure, we were not there, we have to somehow find a way to trust the sources of information that we get informed by.

This is the problem, media right and left have so distorted the “truth” that we really don’t know what we can believe anymore, or who we can trust as an unbiased source of information in which to make good decisions with. We can no longer make the fine discrimination in our rational minds, as we are tossed around on a sea of emotional appeals. Yes, emotional appeals work, but at some point we need to sit down and rationally work out our problems, as a nation, as a population, as a multi-cultural society. If we keep on being pandered to, if they keep on going for the emotional appeal, rationality gets further and further away. We end up screaming at each other because the sources of our information have demonized the other, the ones that will destroy western civilization as we know it.

We not only need to have a more civilized discourse, but we need to bring the facts back into the picture. Without knowing what is really happening, and where the true issues are, we can be hardly called a civilization, rather we are “muppets” or “sock puppets”, controlled, manipulated, and more sadly, more ill-informed than we need to be to run America as a democracy.

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Some of you might know that I run my own company, and we have Amazon.com as an outlet for our awesome products. In 2011 we decided early on that we wanted to use

Amazon-New-Detail-Page (Photo credit: kokogiak)

FBA, Fulfillment By Amazon for our products that were top selling to help customers who were upset about the shipping prices. We really thought that we would see a huge bump in sales, and a lot of happy customers. We really thought we were about to embark on the right thing, and we were even talking to an Amazon FBA rep who was very cool and walked us through a lot of stuff.

We duly picked and pulled and packed our stuff and sent it on down to Amazon’s Phoenix Warehouse and were excited because this was going to be awesome. Here is a chance for us to take advantage of Amazon’s ability to do combined postage, and life would be wonderful. We really thought at that point that we were going to do our customers this amazingly good deal, and that everyone would win, happy customers, happy company, happy Amazon.

What happened out of that was a nightmare that lasted nine months as we realized that Amazon’s customers are different than our customers on Amazon. We are a very niche market, and we have very loyal customers via Amazon. We love our customers and our customers expect a very high level of service, packing and shipping that we are more than happy to provide. Amazon was not, as more and more returns for damaged product, without us knowing what was going on. More and more negative and neutral feedback like we have never ever seen in our company’s history started to roll in, complaints, anger, and the growing realization that Amazon did not love our company as much as we loved it. While we did see an increase in sales for those products, the damage that negative and neutral feedback did to us we are still recovering from, and took the better part of a year to bury the neutrals that Amazon would not remove. The good part is that for the most part Amazon did remove the negative feedback, but only upon my request, and only after on average 48 hours after the feedback was left. It was a customer relations nightmare.

Even our FBA guy stopped calling and talking to us.

We went into the belly of the beast, and it was ugly from a customer happiness viewpoint. We ended this experiment in FBA, and eventually pulled everything from Amazon or let it sell out without us sending them anything else.

Over the last couple of days we got a survey from Amazon asking us for our opinion on FBA. The bad part is that it was not really a survey that would let us tell them what we needed to tell them. Rather it was a more generic why you are not using the service any more, focusing more on costs of the service than anything else. Making customers happy is part of the cost process, but I really wanted a text box where I could sit down and write all this out. How Amazon’s core customers are very different in expectations from our core customers all on the same platform. While FBA might work for some things, it did not work for my product, and here is my hypothesis on the issue.

It was a meaningless survey.

It did not allow for customer interaction, there was almost no place to talk about my issues with FBA. Really this was a feel good survey for Amazon. Meaningless, valueless, meant to make managers happy and not really address any real issues with specific customers.

I am more than happy to talk to Amazon, but I don’t think I’ll take any more surveys from them. I love what I do, and early on Amazon was our key sales platform, but we have diversified into other platforms that are outperforming Amazon right now. We love Amazon, but as we grow bigger we have better things to do than take a survey that is a management exercise in feel good politics.

If Amazon really wants to know what we are thinking about FBA, maybe our FBA guy can call us someday and find out what we really think. In the meantime, pointless and useless B2B surveys on why business customers do not do something are on my list of things not to do again.

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Jellyfish (Photo credit: Joshua Schwimmer)

Warning this article uses words on the DHS watch list so be careful what you retweet.

I love this kind of stuff as it brings us closer to our robotic overlords, but the US Navy and some awesome researchers have come up with a robotic jellyfish that is hydrogen powered. As in powered right from what it can take from the ocean and can be used for just about anything you can use a jellyfish for. Talk about being able to terrorize a bunch of tourists at a beach. (Note that this sentence used the word “terrorize” which is on the DHS list of things never to say on twitter, or in social media).

Nothing like a hydrogen powered jellyfish to make your entire day, but this is pretty cool if you read the original research report over on Iopsceince which you can get to right here.  They state:

 Artificial muscles powered by a renewable energy source are desired for joint articulation in bio-inspired autonomous systems. In this study, a robotic underwater vehicle, inspired by jellyfish, was designed to be actuated by a chemical fuel source. The fuel-powered muscles presented in this work comprise nano-platinum catalyst-coated multi-wall carbon nanotube (MWCNT) sheets, wrapped on the surface of nickel–titanium (NiTi) shape memory alloy (SMA). As a mixture of oxygen and hydrogen gases makes contact with the platinum, the resulting exothermic reaction activates the nickel–titanium (NiTi)-based SMA. (42%).

The bad part is that I am thinking this might be an awesome way of running a lander out on Europa and other icy moons around the solar system. If they can drag enough power right from the environment using this same method that will cut down on the amount of power that is needed for our robotic overlords that are exploring the solar system. This might just be an interesting alternative for powering electronics if it can be made small enough. The jellyfish is just the first good way of showing off the technology.

While the US Navy is hemming and hawing on what it could be used for in real life, I am sure they are thinking of some pretty interesting ideas right now for monitoring, tracking and otherwise latching onto enemy warships with a GPS receiver and no one would really notice if this puppy was on someone’s hull. If I can think of this, the boffins over at the USN have probably gone light years beyond what I am thinking. But realistically this is some pretty awesome technology, and well worth reading the original science report. As far as robotic overlords go, with a splash of Doctor Who in there, Jellyfish are pretty awesome.

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This has been a very interesting week for employers and Facebook. I have been writing about this story over on Toolbox, here and here if you are interested in reading,

Image via CrunchBase

but on this site I want to go a little deeper into the idea of asking prospective employees for a username and password to any social site because there is an additional complication, Google Plus. Then there is another issue with all this, federated identity, Single Sign On, using your Facebook and Google credentials to log into other sites.

While I have a question about this out to my friends who work at Google Plus, it is unlikely that I will get an official statement soon as this would be more of a corporate governance policy statement that would have to be made by the company. That means it would have to be official, so this will be a while in showing up in the news.

While it is admirable that Facebook is saying that sharing your password with anyone is a violation of their Terms of Service/Rights and Responsibilities, as well as opening up a kettle of worms that Employers might not be all that comfortable with or know how to handle, the entire social landscape of systems, Twitter, Facebook, G+, and for those who are persisting on dead systems like MySpace, Beebo, Friendster and Orkut also need to think about this one. We use our logins to access many sites, if your employer has the password and user name, they can go anywhere you have set up a federated identity, or make new accounts on questionable sites in your name. That is a lot of power, the power to impersonate a person with valid credentials.

Tell me how this is any different from identity theft at job point. The loaded gun pointed to your head is “just how bad do you want to be hired”, if you really want to be hired you will turn over your entire online life to us.

While the obvious applies here, you should not post anything anywhere that you need to keep private. That is what good old phone calls are for. That is just a good rule of thumb, anything social is like standing on a street corner with a huge sign that says “get it here”. People are going to see it, share it, talk about it, and if it even remotely looks bad for you from an employer perspective you pretty much so have to suck this one up. This is why I highly recommend scrubbing your online profiles when you have done stupid stuff, because we all do stupid things in life along the way.

Of course this argument does not end with Facebook; really this is the visible portion of the iceberg. Twitter I have a personal account and a company account, which one do I want to share? Which one portrays me in the best light; both accounts have questionable content depending on your frame of mind. My idea of normal might not be my employers’ idea of normal.

If I had to turn over my Google Plus account, well that is a federated system giving them access to my private YouTube videos, my e-mail, my Google docs including what my friends have shared with me, and some of it is questionable content. This includes all my Google apps, and everything else that I use on Google and how they all interlink via the federated identity system.

And that is just another point in this conversation, how many of us use our Facebook credentials to log into web sites? I do, on 9Gag and tons of others, including my SmugMug account. I have private galleries on SmugMug that are not for public consumption because I am also a professional photographer and do this at times for some seriously awesome dollars. Do I really want people to get a deep dive into my personal sense of humor if they go visit 9Gag? What about Hootsuite, Klout, Pinterest, and other sites I use with my Facebook login? How much does an employer really want to know about me right now?

Federated identity just adds to the complexity, once they have the username and password, your world is theirs, they can be you. How much do you trust the other person driving the keyboard and working in your name? If you are a control freak this will drive you absolutely insane in three seconds or less.

What about Porn Sites? They also allow Facebook connect.

What about everything that is interconnected through your history files? Really could be bad and really could be interesting, and really could be damaging when we find out exactly what kind of perverts we can all be, while we try to make our public images as fine upstanding pillars of the community. The kettle of worms is now open, and this is where this gets interesting. Federated identity makes for an interesting day, which is why I am personally glad to see Facebook taking a stand on this one.

Waiting to see what Google comes up with as a response. I really want this to go to trial too, we might just need to decide this one in the courts.

If you have ever read Failbook over at the wonderful I Can Haz Cheezeburger site then you will see a collection of grammar disasters as well as some unique spelling ideas for

Image via CrunchBase

common words we use every day. While the Google Docs team is very proud of enhancing their spell check to incorporate new words for trending bands or other items of interest, let’s pray they do not use Facebook as a source of wonderful spelling otherwise we are all in deep English language problems. How some of these people are allowed to graduate with the awesome L337 skillz, I dunt knew. In the meantime, here is some of my favorite Facebook fails when it comes to the use of wicked awesome speling skilz.

see more Failbook

see more Failbook

see more Failbook
 

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This is yet another reason to dig our brothers and sisters in Hong Kong, the International Pole Dance contest was held in Hong Kong on the 15^th of March 2012.Talk about

Image via Wikipedia

your awesome contest, more awesome than the contest we are having over at my company this week for designing a logo. Not only that it looks like Pole Dancing has taken on a whole new idea of fitness, and health that we simply did not realize. There are a ton of Pole Dancing contests across the USA to help weed out the folks who will not make it to the finals in Hong Kong.

There is even a cool video of the contest over on YouTube from 2008 that is worth taking a look at as well. While we often make jokes about Pole Dancing, from the looks of it this is a huge business, and one way of staying fit and healthy.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

What makes this even cooler is that there is a men’s division for this, so some awesome equal opportunity for both boys and girls. Who knew that Pole Dancing would become a competitive sport, now we just need to add this to the Olympics lineup and I bet that contest would be the hottest thing on TV for the duration of the show. Check it out right here at the Pole Champion web site; it is in English so you won’t have to struggle with it.

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