Tag Archives: social media

Meeting Santana

santana

I just connected with Santana on LinkedIn

I couldn’t believe he reached out to me like that — so totally amazing, right?

I mean, its not Carlos Santana, of course — its Henderson Santana

I don’t really actually know Henderson Santana IRL { that’s ‘in real life‘ for those not familiar with internet slangology ;] } — like, we’ve never actually met face-to-face or anything, or even virtually now that I think of it

This makes me pause and wonder a bit …

Am I too friendly on social media? Is it wrong or strange to connect randomly like this in an online and public forum like this ( and other ) social web experience prior to actually knowing a person and how they might influence my personal brand, among other potential ripple effects to my online identity? Do I take my social presence across multiple SM properties too lightly? Do I come across as I too playful and too casual online? Do others perceive me as unprofessional or inappropriate by my accepting a request like this to connect upon a cold and seemingly random invitation sent by a virtual ( and also real ) stranger that lives somewhere in the world on the other side of my computer monitor?

All I know is it frikkin’ Friday y’alL — enough with The Spanish Inquisition here, right? — who cares? — I’m here to have fun, get some rawkin’ creative work done, and to just play and discover the rules through experimental, semi-naïve doing — if Henderson or Carlos or any other of the mere instant acquaintances start to even feel toxic via Social, there’s an amazing click or tap I can access to cut ’em away — or better yet, I could interact a bit and find out what the strange behavior’s all about, when and if it even happens at all

but, up front — I give people the benefit of the doubt for a bit up-front and figure it all out as I go along — why over-stress about this shit, right? — i mean its just Social ;]

prince n’est plus mort

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well — about 4 years after The Artist formerly know as Prince officially declared to the world:

The internet’s completely over. I don’t see why
I should give my new music to iTunes or anyone else.

— Prince, 2010 in an interview with the Daily Mirror

it seems as if his Purple Badness went all twisty turvy in the entirely opposite direction

with his new resigned / reworked business relationship back with Warner Brothers Prince is slated to release 2 new albums on September 30th, 2014 — he’s releasing the long-awaited Plectrum Electrum under the project name 3rdEyeGirl, which is a far more gritty rawk outfit with a live an’ trippy sense of delivery and performance, as well as the old school all-Prince album Art Official Age done up in the every instrument done up by Prince studio-style that the master musician grew to fame

you can go pre-order both albums up on the 2 official websites as: CDs with MP3s; MP3s; or as WAVs from the site and you can also pre-order up via iTunes and Amazon as well — and, not to mention all the social mediatized hype His Royal Badness put up on the interwebz like some sort of messianic 5 foot 2 inch purple yoda Obama mad on the ultra-webbified campaign trail, live streaming concert footage with 3rdEyeGirl up on LiveStream { the account is now interestingly deleted, hmmmm }, single pre-release samples up on various sites via SoundCloud, live clips of 3rdEyeGirl via Dr. Funkenberry via SoundCloud sounding’ all stripped down ‘n funkyCool, there’s literally been a strange Prince Revolution brewin’ an’ in the works now for over a year that’s been building such fervor and excitement for the fan-base — its truly incredible

i’m obviously really lookin’ forward to the new tracks i got comin’ in the mail an’ via the webz ;]

‘sGonna be so, so good

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some notes about the social web

Smiling Asian woman taking a selfie

our lives changed a lot with the advent of the social web

but the social web alone isn’t the sole force behind the major shift in our cultures and our behaviors as this brand spankin’ new, always-on society of netizens take the social web and add the personal portability of our mobile devices PLUS the embedded camera technologies that make instant photoSharing as easy as peasy-ness and them’s the 3 magic ingredients that made for some major changes in the world { at least in the Americas } the mobile phone also cracked open the world to this sort of constant tower of babble that we’re all exposed to ‘out there’ in the multiverse as well — and you know what i’m talkin’ ’bout here Willis — the aural patina of constant chatter in public places like our big chain convenience stores, malls and other previously semi-polite spaces now fall victim to the ubiquitous right we all now enjoy as carriers of mobile technologies — anyplace, anytime you like you can make a call and unleash the oftentimes mindless detritus of your daily proclivities upon your publicSpace neighbors around you — and, of course, you can snap a selfie or totally lifeStream just about any part of your day, no matter how ultra-trivial it might feel { or actually be } to create those special instaMemories { complete with orange-faded photo filter effects and cutesy captionings }

of course, as a cyberSurrealist, i completely understand some untapped potential for all of this self-oriented social media broadcasting goin’ on in the world all around us

as annoying as it sometimes feels, its interesting to think about our photo-documentiatic obsessions and just how much of our human experience — whether its considered to be an actual reflection of the mirror-life we’re all creating or some sort of simulated performance alter-egotistical manifestation of what we want our lives to be projected as — gets uploaded to the interwebz …

a transitional shift

from a user-centered experience designer’s point of view, and as a self-proclaimed ‘transitional’ { mentally living somewhere between our current, over-mediated lifestyle and the previous all-analog lifestyle that came before the advent of these myriad new technological advances }, its psychologically fascinating to see the show that’s being put on and to understand the subconscious outlet that’s being documented and curated every single day — these communication channels and our usage, whether intentionally used for the purpose of cataloguing the transition or not, totally capture the immense changes we’ve all been dealing with, and the results of our introduction to these new avenues of output and interaction have tremendous and very telling influence over who we really are as a society and what we desire and what we’re becoming

these telecommunication technologies, like drugs and alcohol and other addictive consumer products, reduce our inhibitions and allow us all to behave the way we were born to behave sans our previously semi-polite social standards — walls and windows in the previous social structure remain cracked and broken open and the little Freudian Pandora’s Boxes residing at the core of our psyches have been picked open with all of our interior monsters now unleashed upon the new world of more honest { but unfortunately not nice } human behavior through the stage of our social media we see the performance of our subconscious selves acted out on an hourly basis — we share, we like, we comment with the tips of our sublingua straniera interiori — our inside-out existence technologically augments the subconscious beasts within us all, unless, of course, you’ve figured out a way to get some conscious control over what you so choose to tweet and share and instaPost to these supposedly social broadcast mechanisms

read more at cyberSurreal on tumblr

asking the right question

sometimes i wonder { and it actually came up today while commuting to Schneider Electric in North Billerica } when am i going to get back to painting again?

i mean, sometimes i bump across something as wonderfully tactile and visually beautiful as this little detail from one of Suzanne Unrein’s paintings and i think, ‘i should just fucking start painting again, right?’

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i wouldn’t have even seen this painting were it not for that there despicable ‘Book’ we all seem to supposedly socialize on, right? its the new micronetted, fenced-in and illusionistically ‘secure’ subconscious playland that the entire internet used to be … Facebook, that is, not the Suzanne’s paintings … the painting is obviously creamy and gorgeous, right? shit, its just so inspiring

but then, 2 clicks away i come across an image like this

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and i don’t know, maybe i’m an anarchist at heart or something, but … this painting, or rather this object, sings to me in a different way — this one really resonates with me on an entirely different and more honest level … i guess in some ways this painting — ‘Niagara Falls,’ by Valerie Hegarty — better reflects the way i feel about our times … its equally gorgeous and seems to comment, too, on the medium of paint and on the memory of what painting used to be and what it is today

after seeing this work and reflecting a bit more about it, i started wondering, ‘why would i get back to painting?’ which might just be a clever excuse to not even start any sort of active creative endeavors at this point in my life, right?

i seem to find plenty of excuses to think about this shit tons more than i actually do it, though, right? and loving both expressive artworks shown here shouldn’t stop me from just making art of any kind, maybe starting up with one medium and seeing where the artmaking leads me — sort of a follow the leader via artistic and designerly media

anyhow, i gotta get over to work now, right? wake up, lou … jeez, what the fuck are you doing?

heh

 

LinkedIn Answers: What is the worst website you ever saw and why?

Cookie cutters

Image by litlnemo via Flickr

Rich Kellerman of MarketAmerica posted the following question to LinkedIn Answers. I’ve included a link to the thread up on LinkedIn as well as my response for your reading pleasure. Enjoy!

View the LinkedIn Answers thread here: http://hotsects.com/liworstweb

What is the worst website you ever saw and why?
This question pertains to active websites. Please exclude one page websites.

This is a tough question to answer. Some fantastic, classic examples of horrific website design were already posted and they totally make me laugh ( and thanks for posting them ).

As an accomplished and seasoned designer … and one that keeps up with all the current trends and terminology … I have to say there is currently a proliferation of bad websites ‘out there’.

After recently reading Jarod Lanier’s ‘You Are Not a Gadget’ I came to the guided realization that it is too easy for the average person to put together and release a blog, website or some online experience. I realize that not everyone participating on the web today might need a designer for what it is they are trying to accomplish with their online extension and expression, but I cannot emphasize how tiring it is lately to come across website after website that use the same cookie cutter out-of-the-box blog app theme … or some componenture from the same 4 to 7 Web 2.0 canned content widgets. Right now I could Google a topic, visit the top 10 sites that come up and probably discover most of the links lead us unto the WordPress ‘N’ Theme with modifications by ‘designer’ such and so.

Step back a bit …

That said, these are truly exciting times. I love the Web 2.0 world we live in. Social media. All that. We have a short window right now of near-democratized capabilities to really say what’s important, publish anything we want on the web, stand up for something good or stand up against those things we find frustrating or bad. But how many of us feel we can really put it ALL ‘out there’ without somehow hurting our public brand. How many people are really using this new democracy of expression to its full advantage? To say something unique and important? To find out what’s next, right around the corner?

From the conversations I find myself in these days, I have the sorry notion that the ability to freely publish to the web, to take advantage of this amazing space we have to form online and real world communities, to hold certain people accountable for their contributions to our newsScape, and to just put up your real, genuine feelings and point of view to reach out … that ability could be both underutilized and soon slipping away ( we need to stand up for net neutrality and keep our only people-driven means of communication open and free and clear ).

Anyhow, my point might be … there are many ‘worst websites’ online right now. In the great Dadaist tradition, I stand up and scream with a big:

Down with the cookie cutter websites!
Down with abandoned sites and those left out of date!
Down with experiences lacking any real content or meaning!
Down with the clone! The marching detritus of free and easy templature!
Down with the sites lacking direction, focus or feeling!

Let us now take a pledge to stop pointing our fingers. We know what is bad. What’s the worst. And the many reasons why. Let us come together with every bit of energy we can muster and collaborate. Yes, let’s work together to build an even brighter and beautiful web. A smart landscape of online experiences and websites that:

1. Consider an audience
2. Talk to that audience in a happy, human way
3. Provide something of value to that audience
4. Exist for some purpose … to make money, that’s a good one ( perhaps the lesson from bubble burst 1.0 would be develop a business plan ) and one that most sites might want to think about from the inception of their product, service or content. But there may be a myriad of purposes ( of course )
5. Connect people ( real people to real people, no pre-recorded, robotic and faceless organizations that text you in the night )
6. Serve some greater sense of goodness
7. Sing

Links: http://www.amazon.com/You-Are-Not-Gadget-Manifesto/dp/0307269647

Social Media Breakfast 15 | CommuniSpace | Watertown MA

Here we go … just a few of the many photos I took while at the SMB15 with Bryan Person, Rachel Happe and Diane Hessan all talking about ‘The Power and Peril of Online Communities’

Semantics Killed Social Media – Advertising and Marketing Blog – AdPulp.com

Semantics Killed Social Media

PORTLAND — Inside Nemo’s cavernous warehouse space on Southeast Belmont an after work crowd is gathered drinking Mirror Pond, noshing on cheese and talking shop.

Amber Case is here. Uncle Nate is here. Rick Turoczy is here. Everyone’s gathered to learn the answer to this rhetorical question: Who Killed Social Media?

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image courtesy of Rick Turoczy

Nemo’s Dave Allen has an answer. Sort of. Allen makes a semantic distinction between “Social Media” and “the Social Web.” He sees Social Media as just another push mechanism for marketers, whereas the Social Web is about life, peoples’ interests and what they’re busy doing day to day. In other words, the Social Web is about us, not them.

Marshall Kirkpatrick, Vice President of Read Write Web is moderating tonight’s panel, which also includes Tony Welch from Hewlett Packard; James Todd of Twine; Matt Savarino of K2 Sports; and action sports industry veteran Lee Crane.

Welch says, “SEO and SEM will be dead in six months,” which provokes several audible guffaws from the audience, for some in the room no doubt make a living by feeding The Google what it wants. But according to Welch, The Google is changing its diet and is increasingly returning results generated from the Social Web. “It’s about reputation management now, so distribute your assets,” warns Welch. In other words, what people say about a brand or a company is equal, if not superior, to what the brand or company says about itself.

Speaking of what people say, Dave Allen is fired up about what people are saying this week in response to radical changes at eMusic. eMusic unilaterally decided to add Sony’s back catalog to its offerings and concurrently altered their pricing structure for the worse. Allen, who helped build eMusic into the indie music source it has become for its 400,000 subscribers, believes the mess eMusic is in could have been avoided entirely if the company had simply taken out an insurance policy in the form of a $55,000/year Community Manager.

Allen mentions that he blogged about the eMusic issue on his Pampelmoose site and also on Social Cache, Nemo’s blog. eMusic’s PR dept. has been in touch as a result. This tidbit raises Kirkpatrick’s eyebrow. Kirkpatrick asks Allen how one can get away with being so outspoken in a business context.

“You must have an opinion,” declares Allen. “Why would I be asked to be on a panel or why would I blog, if I didn’t have anything to say?” Allen adds that generally people don’t take offense because the Social Web gives them a chance and a place to respond.

An audience member steps to the mic and asks,” If Social Media is dead, what’s next?”

Saravino says geolocating is next. He believes that geolocation will be built in to various services and apps and become a common place offering. If he’s correct, we won’t just know what our “friends” are thinking, we’ll know where they’re thinking it.

Saravino adds that while it’s not new, many brands have no mobile Web site. He doesn’t understand why, especially for brands going after a youth market. He says kids aren’t on smart phones, they’re using free flip phones and brands need to be there, where the kids are.

..:: datamummification + madness ::..

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Judith Donath stopped in at Media Tech Tonic sponsored at MassArt’s The Dynamic Media Insitute to discuss The Sociable Media Group’s latest exhibit ‘Connections’ at The MIT Museum. A lot of amazing work … I checked out some of the people involved in the project work earlier in the day … specifically looking deeper into some of the previous work in visualization and interface design. I particularly enjoyed Alex Dragulescu’s ‘Spam Architecture’ as I had previously attempted to approach the topic of troublesome eMeddlings in my own ‘Operation Enduring Email’ …

but seriously folks … the jist of the discourse tonight centered around a new ‘new media’ twist on the concept of portraiture … excellent lecture, fantastic work all around … i especially loved the participatory installation ‘metropath(ologies)’ … such a dream project for me … the overflow of information projected on a cityscape model, a veritable maze of data + architecture to get lost in … amazing work + the best of the collection shown at the talk … i gotta get down there + check it out

i’ve digressed once again … so, back to portraiture … a quick whirlwind history of the portrait as an artform … a golden bust of royalty from greco-roman times, renaissance-painted realism complete with symbolic items and less idealized facial features, 20th century cubistic renditions capturing a more abstract essence of Picasso’s art dealer, and for the 21st century …

the portrait of the micromoment involved feeds from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Seesmic and other multivariate social networking sites the your modernday eCitizen gladly pours information into with feverish up-to-the-minute details about the minutae of our daily lives … ‘Data Portraits’ took the unsuspecting tweets of the twitterverse to create a portrait visualization of each user … words { the smallest common denominator allowing some balance between private and public exposure } from the user | participant’s tweetstream make up the outline of head, neck and shoulders … words on the left are from recent tweets, words along the right of the datahead silhouette are the most-used throughout your tweetstream history … the words of each portrait pop forth from the black backdrop muchlike a smooth data-persona tagcloud, quite literally outlining your wordstream of the moment for you

what strikes me the most about these linear-textual gestural snapshots is the cocoonlike and ghostly bodily presence of each figure … there’s also a wonderful sense of swirling … the words seem to envelope or mummify a preset human form … besides certain key words that pop out { i am guessing the word size follows the same sort of rules of frequent use that most tagcloud methodologies implement }, there is little differentiation from portrait to portrait … the shape of the head, neck and shoulders remains the same … and the words simply outline or ‘contain’ the previously human form

at first i thought that the datamummification might be a purposeful artisitic and aesthetic choice … i don’t think i get the sense that my portrait would look that much different than anyone else as far as physical attributes are concerned … same height, same weight, same shape, same lack of eyes, mouth, ears and hair … you are your words in these portraits … you are the ghostly echo-trace of your micro-bloggings … a bit sobering … a little scary … and unless you are lucky enough to have micro-entered some emotionally-laden and unique words over the last year or so, you are just as unique as everyone else on Twitter …

part of me wants to think these implications are an intentional affect of the visualization as portraiture … and if nothing else, perhaps we can see this as a subconscious expression of the artists involved … maybe there is no true participatory auto-magical means to create this sort of portrait … or perhaps the effect is completely intentional … a statement about machine-produced { app-influenced } human behavioral modificationthe media we use shapes our behavior, and now we quite literally all itch to tell it all right now … a sort of electronic OCD …

another memorable concept that came up tonight was the notion of ‘pure knowledge’ … an amazing question from the crowd mentioned Elie Weisel’s Zalmen, Or the Madness of God … in the book a person comes to know God, but not as the bearded, old white guy in the clouds oft-depicted by Michelangelo … but instead as the concept of ‘pure knowledge’ … the question specifically asked tonight had to do with the current proliferation of information ‘out there’ for all of us to access and whether or not we, as humanity, are reaching a moment of ‘pure knowledge’ … my own answer to this concept delves into questioning ‘knowledge’ … information is not knowledge … accumulation of datapoints provides no higher wisdom to the individual or to society at large … consuming data alone, collecting data does not translate into knowledge or a deeper understanding … in fact, my personal belief is that knowledge and wisdom are not even closely related … and neither can ever be thought of as ‘pure’ …

B.F. Skinner quote | thought + modernday ‘new media’ ::..

“The real problem is not whether machines think
but whether men do.”
B.F. Skinner

i found this quote above to be of extreme interest due to some of the DMI readings and the topics from last night’s conversation … Design Seminar 1 readings for this week brought us to the Turing Test ::..

Turing asks us: Can we create a machine with interaction capabilities that would trick us into thinking it is, in fact, human? ::..

yesterday, in class, we discussed new media, technology, social networks, collapse of the Western financial world, lots of good stuff … but in the end we began to identify what exactly we are rewarded for in modern societymachines, computers specifically, allow us to interact without any sense of time or place … we can contribute with immediate expression … anything that comes to mind … little if no filtering involved … no editors { sometimes a moderator }, little-to-no financial deterrents … unmediated thought assault ::..

quality of thought seems to depend upon the actual community or website involved … the plus and minus of free speech … feel the sting … it keeps coming + coming + coming … so many people contributing to the noise or music of this modernday symphony of information ::..

Laura pointed out that its a bit overwhelming … all the people … friends on Facebook, how can you have 200+ ‘friends’? or does it mean something else entirely to be a ‘friend’ in the social media sphere? ::..

so, with computers, in this machine age, we are given speed, ease-of-use, access to more information than ever before … we have the means to communicate at such a rapid pace that the quantity outweighs the quality ::..

the point that i am trying to return to here … one that we settled on in class … is that with this quickened pace + access, the ease with which we can click, contribute, purchase, communicate … with all of our progress … we are encouraged to skip thought, to skip thinking? when asked the question, you cannot blink, just say ‘yes’ … make that decision { click } … buy that product { click } … add your opinion { click } … divert your attention { click } from what might just be something huge + scary + vitally important ::..

click here to think