Reunion Generation

I belong to a generation of people who lived their lives going from one social sphere to another. Through the levels of education - elementary, junior high (now called middle school), high school proper, college, then grad school for some. In amongst those social milieus, there were others - various clubs, organizations, sports groups, etc. We moved in a progression through school, and in and out of activities, all the time meeting new people and making new friends. While we would carry some friends onward, and turn some aquaintences into friends, our steady march through school meant that we would have to lose touch with some people as we changed locations. Sure, some of those people stayed in our spheres, but the vast majority did not. It was a badge of maturity to leave high school and everyone you knew and loved and go to college somewhere else. Sure it was scary, but necessary - necessary for growth, we thought. If someone held on too tightly to the past - if they insisted on going to every high school football game once they started college - we saw them as somewhat flawed. It was imperative that we move forward, and a big part of that movement meant separating from one social circle and creating a new, often more diverse group around us.

Still, it wasn't like we wouldn't see our old old friends ever again. That was what reunions were for. Coming back to that homecoming game. Running into one of your best buddies at the mall. Keeping touch through holiday cards. And looking forward to the pinnacle event of them all - the organized reunion. We kept in touch with the major changes, high points and low points of our best friends through these tools. While we knew about computers, none of us had one. The PC didn't exist. Our biggest technical challenge was learning to type on an IBM Selectric. There was no Internet helping our communications fly at the speed of light.

There is a generally-used name for my generation - Baby Boomers (Boomers for short.) We define ourselves by our forward motion, by how many new people we can meet, become intimate with, pull into our ideas, or impress. We always look forward, to the next group of people, consigning those times we look back to those officially-sanctioned reunions.

Take a look at this great post by Seth Godin, which got me thinking about the Reunion Generation. In Facebook's generational challenge, Seth talks about how he's not used to using Facebook the way younger generations use it. He relates a small tale about a college student he knows who was able to contact tons of people in her upcoming class, so that everyone knew everybody before they set foot on campus.

This is, to me, related to information I've read about how the "younger generations" continue to be involved in their friends' lives through My Space, Facebook, and social media on the Web.

They build on their circle of friends as they go along. No need to move on to the next social circle, when you can keep everyone abreast of your life - and they, you - on a daily basis through online networks. I'm guessing that they don't see this continual contact as a negative thing, the way we in the Reunion Generation might. Their definitions of maturity don't involved sailing away from one shore and losing contact with the island altogether in search of the next beach.

Antarctica, Part 2
(Click here for what I previously wrote on this subject.)

The New York Times kept me in my seat on Sunday when they took advantage of "new media" capabilities with their arts section article "Unraveling the Knots of the 12 Tones."

Author/critic Anthony Tommasini contributed a video in which he performed examples of spiky, unpopular 12-tone music. Although his presentation may not be fully comprehensible by the general public (he uses words like "tonic" without much of an explanation), he is effective at showing us how the revolutionary 12-tone composition method pops up where we least expect it, and convinces us that we don't complain all that much when it does.

This is a great way to provide us readers with a better understanding of the article. However, the Times probably won't go as far as the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, which actually provides links to YouTube videos supporting articles.

The Milwaukee example shows us that newspapers can add even more interactivity and cross-media resources. In producing their own video, the Times keeps us on their site, but probably runs into time constraints which keeps them from providing even more to readers. (Anthony sits at a piano the entire time you watch the video.) It's quicker and cheaper to research and provide links to a greater number of media sources than it is to produce a video on one's own. For instance, I found this video on YouTube, which is a great companion piece to the Times article.

And I hope no one thinks I'm stalking Chris Brogan when I suggest you see what he has to say and link to on the topic of "finding information."

Of course, there's nothing stopping us from going to YouTube ourselves and doing the research. So, we're going to leave the Times's site anyway. But it makes me wonder when the Times will realize it's more than a newspaper and a media creator?

Improving Public Radio Fundraising at the Local Local Level

I'm listening to WETA-FM's pledge drive - that week of programming public broadcasting inflicts on us in order to stay in business. The station's promised a shorter drive this time, and is playing more music during it than they used to. Every so often they include a story from one of their announcers, reminiscing about how they discovered and grew to love "classical" music. And I wonder:

Why doesn't the station catch and air listener stories?

The idea grew out of Chris Brogan's post on creating microcontent and hyperlocal media. I thought it might be easy for WETA-FM to set up a blog* to encourage listener's stories. During the fund drive they could scan the blog comments for stories, and promise to include some of them on the air. In fact, they could say "If you make a donation at any amount, and you've contributed a story to our blog comment section, we might just read it on the air." They could continue by contacting a few of the best storytellers and have them record their tales for broadcast after the fund drive is completed.

They're not doing that, though. They're not even reading contributor names on the air. Over the past weekend I heard one of the announcers mention "Of course, we can't read names on the air, because that would take too much time."

I tried to analyze exactly why WETA is not using "new media" to improve their fundraising, and I came up with these possible explanations:

they tried it once before, but the return on investment was nil;
they were still discussing it by the start of the fundraising drive;
they haven't thought of doing it;
they thought of it but weren't interested;
they came up with the idea but found too many internal controls to make it work.

I think it has a whole lot to do with the fact that so many people still don't know how to use "new media" and Web 2.0 applications, much less figure out how to make them work the micro, or neighborhood, level. However, I just heard the WETA-FM announcers mention that many people are pledging money online, at the WETA Web site. Now whether or not that's a sales tactic, I don't know.
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*or some other Web 2.0 online application.

But I Don't Want To Go To Antarctica

I'm currently wondering why the big newspapers (The Times, The Post) still don't hyperlink within their online articles. My guess is that they don't want people leaving their sites, a last-stand effort to regain what they've lost in having to provide so much of their content online for free. But that's just my guess.

This morning I read a Times music review online - "Musical Mysticism in a Search for God" - and once again I thought "it would help to have a link to somewhere I could hear a snippet of this music, so I could better understand what the writer is talking about." I found some samples of Messiaen's organ music on Amazon.com, and you can download individual pieces to your personal-listening device. Just think of what the Times could do if they recast themselves through the ability to hyperlink and started to guide us to a greater understanding, instead of keeping the doors closed.

I think of hyperlinks as wormholes, a doorways taking us from one Web site (kind of like a planet) to another. Online, newspapers seem to be ignoring these wormhole possiblities, or limiting themselves severely to building a wormhole from the bedroom to the bath. This morning, The Washington Post hyperlinked very oddly in the theater review titled "'I Love You': Out of Tune With the Times." Instead of linking to the theatre's Web site (where the play is onstage) in the text, they make you scroll "below the fold" to the end of the article. What makes it above the fold? A link to articles on Antarctica, which has an extremely tenuous relationship to the review. Check it out and see what I mean.

Maybe a better wormhole would be from The Washington Post to the official Web site of the Off-Broadway production.

It May Not Be Your Passion If:

#8 - You don't believe your passion's barriers to entry pertain to you.

Everything has a barrier to entry. Some barriers are more labyrinthine than others. You might be a roller-coaster enthusiast, and think the perfect vacation involves travel to a dozen theme parks experiencing the thrills of hurtling upside down at 60 MPH while spinning along a steel metal track. The barrier to entry? Financial. You can't get into a theme park if you don't have the money.

You might think there are places that have no barrier to entry, but they do.

In the movie "Rudy," the title character dreams of playing football at Notre Dame. But there are HUGE barriers to his entry. His grades suck. He's physically smaller than other players. Very few take him seriously. Even his father tries to talk him out of it. Although Rudy hurtles some barriers (like walking into the coach's office unannounced to meet him), he respects that the main barrier to getting into Notre Dame is his academic ability. So he works on that. And works. And works. And works. And works. And works. Clearly, he respects the university's high wall he has to jump over. But he doesn't just go up and say "Here I am, take me in." He does, however, ask people for their help, which is an entirely different thing altogether.

It's only natural to downplay the barriers you'll have to climb, knock down, dismantle, take the long way around, on your way to success in what you love to do. But if you think, "It'll be a breeze, I'll just walk in and everyone will love me and what I do," then you're probably up for a major disappointment.

#1: You're in love with the idea of your passion, but you can't stand the component parts.

#2 - You and your passion have a long distance relationship (and you aren't willing to move.)

#3 - Pursuing your passion clashes big time with your personality.

#4 - In pursuit of your passion you end up doing things that might be hazardous to your health.

#5 - You say it's your passion, but you spend 100% of your "free," non-work time doing just everything else BUT working on what you say you love.

#6 - In considering your passion, you experience "Klondike Thinking."

#7 - You go into debt because the financial costs of practicing it are way too high.

My blog is worth $53,631.30.
How much is your blog worth?

That Many Presidential Dollars? Really?
A little over a month ago, my blog was worth $O.OO. I used the same program a few minutes ago, and now my blog is worth $$53,631.30. I'm sure being one of 2000 Bloggers has something to do with it. If I could cash it in I could make a substantial payment on my condo and still have money left over for my next vacation.

Technorati: Control or Communication?
I'm going to get geeky for a few minutes...
Thanks to 2000 Bloggers, which included my Z-list blog merely because I asked them to, I've seen my Technorati ranking go from somewhere in the hundreds of thousands (which I am led to believe is bad) to somewhere in the thirty thousands (which I am led to believe is not great but not bad). I've had the number of blogs linking to me jump from zero to around 100. Some calls this "link baiting," and Mack Collier over at The Viral Garden has this to say about that:

Amy Gahran says that 'link-farms' such as the Z-List and 2000 Bloggers are wrong, because they game the system, and skew Technorati's 'Authority-Ranking' results. Yeah they do, but that was kinda the whole point, the system was wrong to begin with and needed to be skewed. Some A-Listers might not agree with me, but any site/blog etc that applies 'authority-ranking' to determine that the content I produce here is better than your content, simply because I have more links than you do, is not only wrong, but evil, and goes against everything that's right with blogging.

My sentiments exactly. I put it this way: I currently make no money from this blog. And it's worth $0.00. I call myself a z-list blogger because there's no letter past z. But that's really what it's all about, right? Sure, I like seeing my numbers fluctuate like they have been doing. But right now, my real support comes from new friends who have read this blog, established bloggers who post comments, and the number of visitors I see nightly through Google Analytics. The controversy over at Technorati, with them getting all bent out of shape because 2000 Bloggers has screwed with their precious rating system - it seems to me they're talking out of both sides of their mouth. On the one hand, this explosion of Web-based individually-created content is seen as democracy on steroids (in a good way). Everybody can have a blog! Sign up for Technorati - claim your blog! Do it today!

On the other hand, their decision to block link counts from "linkbaiting" sites... well, I'm reminded of Ned Beatty's discourse to Peter Finch in Network:

"It is the international system of currency which determines the vitality of life on this planet. THAT is the natural order of things today. THAT is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today. And YOU have meddled with the primal forces of nature. And YOU WILL ATONE. Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale? You get up on your little 21-inch screen and howl about America, and democracy. There is no America; there is no democracy. There is only IBM, and ITT, and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today."

And Technorati.