[ed.note: this is a short post to make up for not posting last night] In conversation last night, I was grasping for the female equivalent of emasculate. When a guy has his masculinity taken from him, it removes his strength, his power. There’s no equivalent word for women; defeminize doesn’t have the same connotations of […]
Chuck Klosterman
I first heard of Chuck Klosterman when the ESPN Sports Guy did an interview with him (here’s part 2). Described as a pop culture guru, the interview made it clear that he spent way way too much time thinking about inconsequential things. And I mean that in a good way. So he was on my […]
Community Capital
I mentioned in the sharing post that community was built off of social capital. Then I wrote a whole follow-up post on community without ever addressing that hanging thread. Oops. Here’s where I was going with that. One of the reasons that humans have evolved such ludicrously large brains is that we need to be […]
Gotta get ’em all
Short post today (and technically it’s after midnight), but I’m going to try keeping up daily posting for most of this month in sympathy with my friends who are doing NaNoWriMo. Christy’s going for NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month), and even though I missed a couple days to start, I’m vaguely going to try to […]
Thoughts on Community
One of my long-time obsessions is trying to understand community. What makes a community work? How do communities form? Why do people fit in some communities and not others? It’s probably obvious that a large part of this obsession is me feeling like an oddly shaped Tetris piece in the social world. I try spinning […]
Sharing
Somebody posted on the Social Media Club New York list a couple days ago, asking why people share. Sharing is a big component of social media and of all Web 2.0 companies, and companies are basically assuming that it’s human nature to share. From open source to Web 2.0 to the Attention Economy, our world […]
Transactional exchanges
I mentioned in my post about customer service that there are certain kinds of experiences which I call transactional. I’m not sure where I heard that term (or if I made it up) (Google makes transactional experiences look like a legal term), and my usage of it is probably not common based on Batman’s reaction […]
Social Media Club
Last month’s initial meeting of the New York chapter of the Social Media Club went well enough that they had a second meeting last night. As previously noted, Social Media Club is one of the things that BrainJams is doing now. It’s still in the formative stages, and it’s unclear what it’s for and what […]
Steve Reich @ 70
This past weekend was the Carnegie Hall part of the Steve Reich 70th birthday celebrations. I’m a big fan of Reich, and so I’d bought tickets to all three concerts a couple months ago. There was a Young Artists concert on Thursday evening, where Reich and his musicians worked with a bunch of young musicians […]
Customer service
I bought a new pair of boots last weekend. I’d been needing a new pair of shoes for a while, as my old sneakers were so worn down that it was actually painful to stand in them for any length of time. I decided to go see if I could find another pair of Ecco […]
