Tech Hermit is Getting an iphone

This is not something to be excited about, not necessarily.
I am joining the ranks of millions of others.
I know I am late to the game, but hey, it's OK for a hermit.
I am nervous. I really don't want this thing to own me. (I'll keep you posted)

So I think I have a learning curve, but I fiddled around with several of my friends iphones and I am most excited about exploring the app store. Would you mind telling me your favorite free app and your favorite paid app?

Simple Social Media Tactic

As I tap into why I find social media so addictive to my own personality, I find that I'm distracting myself with "why" I am so drawn to spaces instead of "how" to best use them. So I should just be honest about the "why" - get it out of the way, and then focus more on the how. So here's why...I desperately want people to like me. I am one of those people who will work tirelessly for the promise of a compliment.

Now that that's over, here is a tactical "how" that you can use, created because of my desperate desire for thank yous and kind words.

I created content a little while ago. It was a helpful schematic for me as I was exploring a new tool, Ping.fm. The tool is relatively new to the technology/social media scene, so there are several who are being newly introduced to Ping.fm every day. After I created it, I wanted to share it with others, get their feedback, and bask in some thank yous.

Every few days I'll hang out on a twitter search feed for ping.fm and anytime any random person asks a question that seems like my schematic can help with, I send them a link to it. It is so addictive. You should try it. It is a great way to move your business or non profit organization from listening to the online conversation to participating in it.

By the way, this post is going out to yammer (through ping) for the first time. The schematic will need an update. By the way, do you use ping? What's your use of it look like?

Twitter Smackdown

Some blogger, speech writer, conference speaker, etc. named David Murray writes this post about his ongoing, well known hate-affair with Twitter.

The post is a mere sentence.

The video he links to is a four minute interview from a PR guy who is highly influential in his own PR circles. The PR guy thinks that Twitter is the best thing ever invented.

The comments that follow are voyeurly hilarious.

People love twitter and people love to hate twitter. I think most of the argument stems from a collision of competing and emerging etiquettes. The etiquette of a world without text messaging vs. society with a text catalyst like twitter in the mix.

Being the kind of guy who has always tried to make peace, I have empathy for both points of view. I am frustrated with the person who cuts me out of a face to face conversation to answer and reply to a text message. I am just as frustrated with people who refuse to find the redemptive qualities of very cool technologies because they are good at tearing things apart.

I don't think there is any escaping the fact that "rude" is constantly in flux. If you are going to embrace new media, you must accept the fact that you are not able to simply learn the graphical interface without also dealing with the social implications of the technology becoming mainstream. 100 years ago, you could go from decade to decade and see very little shift in the way technology questioned the opinion of Emily Post. Today, even the wiki version of Emily Post's blog would have a difficult time keeping up with the rewrites.

Society's need for increased immediacy is killing the newspaper business, our eating habit's, as well as our etiquette. But hasn't the destruction and rebuilding of etiquette been happening throughout history? Isn't it simply happening at a much more rapid pace today?

So come out of your caves and make your arguments for the way we should act toward each other! But don't blame twitter. There is much more at work, changing our society, than this latest fad.

Twitter Satire - funny video

This explains a lot about my desire to stay a tech hermit.


On the other hand.
It's easy to rip something apart.
"Sarcasm" is from the Latin word sarcasma, means to tear the flesh.
I don't really believe that most people shoot to the twittershpere and become as dopey as all the cloud people. I believe most people are trying to find practical ways to redeem technology without being owned by it.

Very funny!

Twitter Cage Match: Cardinals v Steelers

This has nothing to do with the responsiveness of corporations to social media.
It is simply a very fun way to engage and see the twittersphere.

You'll notice the overall numbers represented in this are pretty small, but it has a good sampling. Even if the entire twitterverse were represented, you would probably see the same effect.

I highly recommend choosing "player's names" and clicking play to see the progression. It is funny to watch Fitzgerald go crazy in the 4th quarter.


Play with this tool here.

This is the part of technology that is really enjoyable for me. Making observations about human behavior and aggregating data in real time to see the pulse of pop culture is very interesting. Digg has out with a few tools like this over the past few years that are just as engaging. Better than mindless screensavers.

It's funny that it feels like I can be one step removed from the technology when I'm making grand observations like this. I guess I don't mind being owned by my fascination with emerging technology as long as I have the freedom to withdraw from it without violating some new code of ethics.

Facebook and Fundraising

I have mentioned I work for a technology company. It is actually an agency that assists nonprofit organizations in their online communication and fund raising efforts. So about a year ago, the hermit stuck his foot out of his shell and dipped his big toe in to the wide, facebook ocean.

The abuse your psyche takes while adopting facebook behavior is subject matter for another post. I just want to mention one of the transitional states that happened for me, and what propelled me into an advocate for the tool.

I joined facebook about a week before the video application was added. As soon as I saw that you could send private and public video messages to your friends walls and inboxes, facebook felt much better to me. I can't tell you the number of facebook friends who were so excited to get video messages. Especially in those early days, it was the only thing that kept me using the tool.

Then I was asked to pledge a dollar amount for this non profit group that I really cared about. In the process of figuring out how I would meet my pledge, I decided to use my facebook network. At the time I sent out this video, I had about 330 "facebook friends."



I reached my stated pledge goal within four days. By the time the day of the event came, we had raised 180% of my pledge, just using facebook.

There are dozens of little observations that can be made and applied to fund raising strategies that I could share with you from that little experience. However, at the end of the day, I really just applied sound fund raising principles and applied them to the facebook distribution channel.
I owned facebook on this one.
I honestly was able to do this without facebook owning me.

So the hermit comes late to the party, flirts with technology from a distance, and then is able to use the tool (without my facebook friends being used I didn't get punched in the throat one time!) and not be owned by the technology.

Dont Want A Blog

That was the title of my very first blog. I set it up three years ago just to experiment with the posting routine and the html and the whole process. I posted several items to just figure out embed code and such. -- I was hot stuff. But I wasn't going to be a blogger. That label ought to be reserved for a professional class anyway (the label, not the activity) I think the same thing about golf/golfer.

So it turns out that blogs are now the destination for content. Most everything else in the social media world works as a distribution channel.

So it feels that blogs have become the center of it all. The platform that the rest of social media propels itself from. Before blogs, what was at the center of it all? Newspapers? Publishing Companies? Media Conglomerates?
Do you think those people are freaking out right now?