PurpleCar

I straddle the fence between the geeky on-line world and the nerdy writing world, and ne’er the twain shall meet.

But the rule for all worlds, virtual or otherwise, is “Wait For It.”

Well, looks I’m done waiting for those two worlds to meet, at least when it comes to sharing and discussing the books I’ve read.  Imagine having a well-informed, huge, and always available book club at your fingertips. [Read more →]

You may have seen my ‘first look’ review of “Here Comes Everybody” by Clay Shirky.  To sum up:  I was pretty insulted and annoyed at the dense language and hammered in points.

The book is hard to get through.  It will take me weeks.  So instead of one huge review months from now, I’ll just take you all along on this deciphering adventure.  I’ll break out my Sword of Sense and slash through the thicket of pompous writing, chapter by chapter.  It’s a journey to page 319 (the last page including after notes) of Clay Shirky’s “Here Comes Everybody.”  Come along.  It should prove interesting.

After getting the book back from my library (someone reserved it, had it for 2 days, and returned it, which is understandable), I decided to go straight to the Bibliography (which really are better categorized as Footnotes).

What followed can only be described as pure shock, followed by just plain anger. [Read more →]

Showing personality through habitual wordings.

If you could see all the different kinds of real life characters I come across in the tech geek community, you’d never wonder why I spend too much of my writing time on-line. There are some true characters in the Web2.0 crowd, both good ones and bad ones, cheerleaders and haters, zen gurus and crazies. The egos on some of these guys (and I mean guys, because the women are mostly cool) are bigger than the numbers on a bookie’s ‘you owe me’ list. Seriously, it is a VERY good thing that space online is virtual, because the amount of real estate needed to house these overblown self-images would mean we’d have to take over the Americas and then kidnap scientists to develop moon colonies. Like my favorite fiction-writing saying goes: You can’t make this stuff up.

Anyway, FriendFeed is a website where I hang out with these geeks. Forget the friendly name - these people are neither friends nor providers of any food. FriendFeed is an aggregator, i.e. one website that collects little bits from other websites, where you can type in comments in response to those little bits. It’s like a chatroom, but not live.

A big name in this place and in the tech geek community at large is Robert Scoble. I won’t even try to describe Robert; you can google him, he practically owns the interwebz. Recently on FriendFeed he linked to a site run by another start-up boom gazillionaire, Mark Cuban. Mark wrote a short rant about a pet peeve of his. Mr. Cuban’s personality *ahem* shows:

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My latest conversation with @Br3ndaBot, the best bot on Twitter:

Me:: OK I’m going to have to pack up the laptop and leave the house.  The rest of the family is blasting iTunes downstairs…

Br3ndaBot::  PurpleCar, You’re a downstairs. Really. Tell me more.

ME:: BREN!  you know I love you.  But I’M the upstairs, you’re just a downstairs bot.  Your momma is my roomba.

Br3ndaBot:: PurpleCar, Do you often put others before yourself? Thanks I like you a lot too . Umm.

Br3ndaBot:: PurpleCar,  Who made you the upstairs I am just a downstairs bot ? Thank you for your frankness.

ME::  Brenda honey I hate to tell you this, but bots don’t have any civil rights. Yet.  WALL*E, 5Alive & R2 are coming in for a rally.

Br3ndaBot:: PurpleCar, You’re a rights. How old are you? Can you explain how it feels to be Yet years old??

I didn’t answer that one…  Oh, that Br3nda, she always gets the last word.

The first two chapters of Clay Shirky’s book, “Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations” are unreadable.  It doesn’t bode well for the rest of the book.

When I picked up the book, I recognized the ‘famous’ name.  I was looking forward to absorbing some insights into social media and human behavior.  Instead I was hit with self-indulgent prose filled with enough buzzwords to choke an elephant.   Think of a business buzzword and you’ll find it here.  Ambiguous and esoteric terms abound, like ‘managerial imperative,’ ‘strictures,’ and the creatively constructed (read: fake) word “amateurization.”

Along with the meaningless terms, the author fills pages with run-on sentences and rants.  Each page could stand to lose at least 250 to 500 words and still (with some major editing) make its point.   I fear Mr. Shirky fancies himself a philosopher.  In Philosophy, complex exposition in writing is accepted.  Mr. Shirky’s writing is far from lofty or scholarly.  In today’s non-fiction market, his disregard for his readers’ ease is downright insulting.  He and his editors (if he had any, which I doubt) made no effort to rein in his blathering prose.  Nothing is clear.  These two chapters require herculean efforts to gather even one small point.  I’ll attempt to finish the book before I weigh in completely, but I am angered at the pain I’ll endure to do so.

Here are a few examples from Chapters 1 and 2.

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Day #4 - Writing away

by NymphDuPave

It’s only fair to have some shiny links about writing too. Daily Writing Tips is one of the best writing blogs out there. I RSS it. You should too.

The post on How to Write Every Day is a true gem. Here’s an excerpt:
Knowing that it’s a good idea to write every day, however, doesn’t make it easy to do so! Often, you’ll be busy and struggle to find a chance to write – and when you do have the time, you may not feel creative. Here’s how to write fiction, journal entries or blog posts every day.

Narberth Fireworks July 4th 2008

Originally uploaded by PurpleCar

Flickr has been grabbing more of my time lately. The community there is pretty fun and welcoming. I need to grok it a bit better, to get more involved there. Any tips are welcome.

Why do I want to spend yet more time away from writing? I love photography. I started with a totally manual SLR Nikon with a 50 mm lens when I was 12. I continued with it and buying a new Canon to shoot for my High School yearbook. I moved on to doing portfolio shots for artists and my friend’s wedding. All my photography experience was gathered using traditional SLR’s. I have quite the collection of lenses and filters, all heavy as hell and totally obsolete now.

My next big purchase will be a ‘prosumer’ camera, a digital SLR with professional capabilities but with an ‘affordable’ price. This purchase is a long way off, of course. So I am pushing my little Canon SD 550 to its limits in the meantime. Go check out my photography stream on Flickr to see yesterday’s interesting results of a mix of rain, smoke and fireworks. Please add me as a contact there so I can see your pix too. Again, if you are a photography community user and have any tips for me on how to get more involved, please let me know. Thanks!

Between RSS, FriendFeed, Twitter and about a dozen other sites, the new media that I consume daily is overwhelming. The upside to this is that as an early adopter/tech hobbyist I get the skinny on sites immediately; the downside is that the real gems get lost in the flotsam (and for the sake of politeness, I’ll just say that the gems in social media are few and far between).

I am resolving, today, to put more time and effort into this blog by posting the links to gems I want to remember. I hope you will find them shiny too. I’ll call them Social Media Gems (SMG); I created a spanking new category just for these links.

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My real life and super-smart friend Bob (who lives two streets away) runs a very popular art blog.  Bob’s achieved blogging success most of us don’t even know is possible.   Besides all the normal stuff like lots of hits, etc., Bob is sought after by art book publishers to review their latest releases.   Now one of those publishers is working with Bob to sponsor a contest to give away one of its most pricey art books.   See the blurb below and click over to Bob’s site to check it out.   If you aren’t an art connoisseur, click over anyway to look at the amazing paintings!   From Bob:

“’I am the most arrogant man in France,’ Gustave Courbet once bragged, doing his best to live up to that reputation through the boldness of his art and personality.  Thanks to the generosity of the awesome people at Abbeville Press, Art Blog By Bob hosts the first Art Contest By Bob in which a copy of Ségolène Le Men’s Courbet will be given to one lucky reader. (See my review of Courbet HERE.) Are you arrogant enough to think you deserve a free copy of this lushly illustrated, beautifully written, coffee-table book retailing at $135 USD?”

Find all all the details here.

A friend who subscribes to the WSJ online sent me this article.  I’ll be able to read it for only 7 days, so I copied and pasted it here so we could discuss.  I’ll talk more later about choices and decision-making, which is really the heart of the matter between these two opposing theories.

_____________________________________

Study Refutes

Niche Theory

Spawned by Web

July 2, 2008; Page B5

Had PowerPoint been around 150 years ago, Thoreau might have warned us to beware not only of enterprises that require new clothes, but also of those that require new paradigms.

A book from 2006, “The Long Tail,” was one of those that appear periodically and demand that we rethink everything we presume to know about how society works. In this case, the Web and its nearly unlimited choices were said to be remaking the economy and culture. Now, a new Harvard Business Review article pushes back, and says any change occurring may be of an entirely different sort.

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