Year: 2007

Humor

The older I get, the more I realize that humor (“good” sarcastic humor) shows more of an understanding of a subject than just recitation or memorization of facts.  If I had time, I’d love to do some research into the human humor response and see what the evolutionary treadmill has to say about the development in the human animal.

Now I’m trying to think of a way to tie-in humor to the classes that I teach… hmmm…

Virginia Tech Tragedy

Working and studying in a college environment everyday, I can’t tell you how profoundly shocked and sad I am at today’s shootings at Virginia Tech.

Colleges and universities, of all places, should be places where young and old people alike can study, learn, walk, live and inquire without feeling the least bit threatened.

My thoughts and prayers are with the students, staff, faculty, families and loved ones who suffered so much today and will continue to do so for a long time.

Corporate 2.0? Drifting Too Far From the Shore

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The gap between the digerati and the corporate world continues to grow, and both sides are to blame. Both sides will eventually suffer as a result, although it is the web2.0 digerati that will suffer more than the capital backed corporate world.

According to a March 22 McKinsey Global Survey, “How Businesses are Using Web 2.0,” the number of high level corporate adopters that see the value in platforms such as blogs, wikis and RSS are hovering around one-third.  Steve Rubel offers some insight here from his unique perspective of working for Edelman and being considered a web2.0 expert and advocate.

BusinessWeek reports that:

During January, 2007, 2,847 executives from global companies, 44% of whom were C-level or above, were asked to provide insight into which of nine Web 2.0 technologies they were currently investing in—and how their use of these technologies has evolved over the past five years.

Web services, including software that enables systems to communicate with each other, attracted the largest investments, with 80% of executives reporting that they use or plan to use them. Collective intelligence, which attempts to tap the wisdom of crowds to make decisions, was the second-largest draw, with 48% of executives reporting investments. Peer-to-peer networking, a technique for efficiently sharing music, video, or text files, also attracted attention, with 47% of executives reporting investments.

That doesn’t sound pessimistic, but we must realize that such platforms and technologies are very “1.0” in their scalability and usage in corporate environments. Although the web2.0 trend has been to open these platforms up to new users by easibility, they are not indicative or representative of the type of “exciting” new technologies that we normally point towards when describing web2.0.

BusinessWeek continues their coverage of the story with…

Meanwhile, companies have been reluctant to invest in some of the more mainstream Web 2.0 technologies. Just 37% of executives were using or planned to use social networking, best known for commercial applications like MySpace and Facebook. RSS and podcasts each had just 35% of executives reporting investments. And wikis, the publishing systems that allow many authors to contribute, captured the investments of just 33% of executives. Just 32% of executives reported sinking dollars into blogs, while mash-ups, the aggregation of online content to create new services, brought up the rear, with just 21% of executives reporting investments.

I was shocked to see that wikis outrated blogs. However, it makes sense. Blogs are inherently subversive technologies because they are so easy to create, design, personalize and publish. In a structured corporate environment, such qualities are not welcomed or encouraged on a normal basis.

The fact that RSS, wikis blogs and podcasts still are deemed worthy of investment by only 30-35% of top level corporate execs says that these platforms have hit the glass ceiling. They are not going to gain too many more percentage points of adoption in such an enviroment.

As a result, development and advancement of these platforms will continue, but there will be an ever growing gap between their adoption and usage between the digerati and the corporate world. This will have an obvious affect on the “average” user of the web who will continue to be much more influenced by the corporate world than the web2.0’ers.

The web2.0 advocates and evangelists have blood in their hands and are primarily responsible for this growing divide. I consider myself one of these, so I’ll make use of the personal pronoun “we” when I assert that we have been too smug, too impractical and too sure of our steady progress of Manifest Destiny. We haven’t adequately engaged the “average” (gross generalization) web user when promoting or developing or discussing new programs and platforms and services that are still popping up everyday in the web2.0 world.

Instead, we have become a tribal amphictony which circles around our own campfire of places such as Techmeme or TechCrunch to discuss, grade, and make pronouncements about the usefulness of a web2.0 site, program or platform. In our rush to define what blogging, RSS, wikis and podcasting can do for the web and the world, we have failed to proactively act to go out and demonstrate these promises.

Perhaps web3.0 will cure this and bring some practicality and interaction from outside corporate and average web users into the conversation. However, I think we’ve reached the point of no return in our web2.0 exuberance and we’ve wandered too far away from shore to sail this ship back home.

The Occultation Went Down to Georgia

One of my favorite sites on the web, Bad Astronomy, has news of an interesting event happening tomorrow night in Georgia and Florida…

If you live in southwest Georgia or northeast Florida, on Tuesday evening April 17th at 8:56 p.m. local time, you might see the star Iota Cancri blink out as an asteroid named Xanthe passes in front of it.

As Phil points out, this is called an occultation.

What a rare and unique event!

Human Marketing and Professional Blogs

There’s a place and a catchy name for the type of marketing that I practice.

Components

  1. Amateur
  2. Responsible
  3. Democritized
  4. Fragmented
  5. Non-hierarchical
  6. Based on Attention
  7. Individualistic Open Source
  8. Smale scale and micro profits
  9. Value of ideas as well as commodity products.
  10. Small

Affiliate marketing has (had?) the chance, but it seems tainted, circumscribed and entirely sure of itself.

I need a name.

Fatblogging

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I’ve gone from being a skinny and physically active college freshman to being an out of shape and overweight teacher, writer, consultant and online marketer. Those things are great for the mind, but not for the body.

Right now I’m somehwere in the 200-210 range and need to get down to 175-180 since I’m right at 5’11-6’0 (depending on shoes of course).

So, in an effort to get there, I’m taking part in Jason Calacanis’ great “FatBlogging” movement. I’ll be posting here about progress, trials and tribulations.

I’m using Traineo and FitDaily to keep tabs on my stats. If you are interested in loosing a few pounds, definitely check out Traineo… web2.0 weight management in all of it’s low calorie goodness.

Hopefully by the Affiliate Summit in June I’ll be well below the 200 marker and on my way to 175!

Keep me accountable and kick my butt-

Sam

New Phone Number

I’ve got a new universal phone number for my mobile, office and Skype numbers:

828.414.1824

If you ring that number, you’ll get a hold of me. So, please change my number in your address book.

BTW, this is through a great new service called GrandCentral which allows you to aggregate all of your numbers so that they all connect through a common number. It really is stupid to have a different land line, office and mobile number in this day and age.

Publicized for Assyriology and Twitter in One Day

Wow.

What a day.

I just got home from the SECSOR (South Eastern Conference for the Study of Religion) Annual Meeting in Nashville, TN.

I learned so much at the conference, and I’ll be including specific notes and ideas of things that plummeted me into deep bouts of thought and reconsiderations over the next few days.

At the conference, I purchased a few books… well… a lot of books from the small book show they set up in a hotel conference room. But (Anna), they were all for good causes. One book in particular struck me as something that was a “must buy” and I’m so glad I did pick it up. It changed my life.

Academic books are not read by many people. Most have readership numbers in the hundreds, unless a university class picks them up. So, they are incredibly hard to find if they are in a specific niche, and normally quite expensive.

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One such book is Steven W. Holloway’s new publication form Sheffield Phoenix Press entitled Orientalism, Assyriology and the Bible. Sounds horribly obsucre and boring to most of you, I’m sure. However, my eventual PhD work is EXACTLY in that realm of study combining the history of Assyriology, the history of Old Testament scholarship and how the two collided.

So, of course, I bought the book. It was the only book that the publisher had at the conference, and they wanted to keep it on display for a little while, so I actually had to wait before I was able to pick it up even though I had already paid for it.

On our way out of town, I swung by the publisher’s stand (the SBL publishing arm) and picked it up.  As we started the long trip back to North Carolina, I started flipping throught the table of contents and realized that chapter 1 of the book (“The Beginnings of Assyriology in the United States”) was written by a former professor of mine, Benjamin Foster from Yale, who is a widely known authority on Assyriology and Near Eastern Archaeology.

I flipped a few pages and something caught my eye. I had been footnoted from my

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work published last year by Yale entitled Asia Has Claims Upon New England: Assyrian Reliefs at Yale.

“Floods of joy o’er my soul, like the sea billows roll…”

I’ve had my ups and downs with my academic journey, but having a place in the footnotes of a text on Assyriology, from the widely respected figure of Benjamin Foster nonetheless, was a major major major moment of change in my life. It’s an incredibly small thing in the grand scheme of the Cosmos, but for me, it is a sign post in the middle of the Moabite plain pointing me towards the Promised Land of eventual life as a professor.

I’ve never felt this feeling. I’m overjoyed, excited and confident… and I’m still in shock.

Later, I went over to Barnes and Noble and my article on ShareASale’s experiment with Twitter at the recent Affiliate Summit in Las Vegas had been published in the new Revenue Magazine.

To channel Bono…

And I must be an acrobat
To talk like this
And act like that.

Twitter in the Wall Street Journal

Just posted on the WSJ online is an in-depth article about Twitter (no subscription required) and it’s (ir?)relevance for all sorts of things.  The choice is yours on that relevancy scale.  Personally, I think it’s the greatest thing since sliced blogging.

Particularly fun to read is this interesting interchange between Tara Hunt and Robert Scoble…

Twitter’s expanding popularity has frustrated some users. “I’m a little annoyed by some of these newbies,” said Tara Hunt, a 33-year-old marketer in San Francisco who complains that many users seem to be focusing on quantity over quality in their updates. She blames the influx of new users on Mr. Scoble, a Twitter user who began writing frequently about the service on his blog earlier this year. She removed him from the list of people whose posts she follows, turned off by his frequent notes about the service itself. “He Twittered about Twitter,” she said.

“Twitter hate is the new black,” joked Mr. Scoble, who is linked to more than 1,000 friends on the site. “Some haters have already come around, but to tell the truth, they do have a good point. Do you really need to know that I’m eating a tuna sandwich for lunch? Probably not, although I’ve had more than one person come over and join me for lunch because I told where I was hanging out.” As a concession, he has created a second Twitter account, called “SilentScoble,” where he limits his posts to five a day. A recent dispatch: “It’s hard to post less than five posts per day…”

Can’t we all just get along?

Phases and Stages, Circles and Cycles

Should I just merge CostPerNews with this site?

I’m tired of blogging in two places, then Twitterin‘ then keeping my Tumblelog going. Well, the last two ain’t that hard (and I really enjoy both of them), but blogging similar thoughts in two different places seems a little silly at this point in my career.

Maybe I should move all of my marketing stuff over to another place. Hmm…

Let me know what you think…

Twitter and Realizations about Myself and Affiliate Marketing

I get frustrated easily with close minded people.

Perhaps that is my biggest failing.

I’ve tried and tried to change it, but I don’t think I ever will accomplish that goal. I have all the tolerance in the world for religions, creeds, colors and nationalities. Yet, I cannot get myself to accept that people can become so smug and convinced of their own rightness in such a post-post-modern world.

Twitter has helped me to realize some important things about myself. That’s weird to say and I can’t really explain it beyond writing that it has pushed me further into realizing that some people just suck, no matter how hard I try to justify their thoughts, actions or intents.

Thanks to Tara for this post on Twitter and twitter philosophy…

Home Improvement

Ugh.

Two weeks of scraping concrete off of hardwood and I’m sick of home improvement.  In 1992, the owners of our house decided it would be a great idea to tile both the kitchen and the hallway with blue tile that is reminiscent of the YMCA locker rooms.

Sadly, they put tile directly on top of beautiful oak floors.

So, we’ve been trying to get the tile and concrete off the floors and refinish them.  Today is the payoff as the floor professionals are here sanding and refinishing.  We’ll be staying in a cabin over the weekend while the finish dries.

Plus, we got a new sewer.

Details and pics are on Anna’s blog…