Well, not really. I got a lumbar epidural steroid injection Thursday and while the experience wasn’t as bad as I feared, the results have yet to come. The hope from my doctor is that this will kick my physical therapy back into gear. I’ve been told it can take a few days before the effect is felt. Keeping my fingers crossed.
Norgs and Social Software Links for July 17th, 20007: Three Must Reads
I believe that the Web comprises a living representation of human nature and desire. Our hopes, dreams, wants, needs, joys and hates. Our need to connect with one another. The Web, simply put, is made of people, and the hyperlink is a representation of that.
I realize this makes me sound like some kind of hopeless hippie stuck in 1998, but the proof is all around us.
Jeff Jarvis puts it like this:
Local is people. Our job is not to deliver content or a product. Our job is to help them make connections with information and each other.
I could have just as easily quoted Howard Rheingold from the mid-nineties.
Real successes on the Web have shown an understanding of this, whether you call these sites, services and communities Web 1.0, Web 2.0 or whatever – it doesn’t change – and it won’t change – unless something significant happens to the underlining architecture we all participate on.
So when I read the next three pieces that Mathew Ingram says (when you take into account Dan Gillmor’s Bayosphere) reflect a trifecta of failure we can all learn from, it simply reinforced that belief for me.
Center for Citizen Media: Dan Gillmor: Citizen Media: A Progress Report (where are matters now? where are they headed in the future?)
Mark Potts: Backfence: Lessons Learned (great reflections from a Backfence founder)
Wired: Jeff Howe: Did Assignment Zero Fail? A Look Back, and Lessons Learned (certainly not a failure – there is a lot here to be learned from – and what was produced – and continuing to be produced – is to be proud of)
Previously:
PressThink: Guest Writer Liz George of Baristanet Reviews Backfence.com Seven Months After Launch (she nailed it didn’t she?)
Even more previously:
In my opinion, “Small Pieces Loosely Joined” is still the most important book to read about the Web. It will make you realize that on the Web – participatory media happens. All the ideas, features, and concepts we thread through it, we try and trumpet, won’t change it. We can either recognize it – work with it – realize it’s a wondrous, powerful thing – or try and re-invent it or usurp it. The later leads, eventually, to failure. As the record shows.
(note – I was an advisor to NewAssignment.net – so you can take what I say with a grain of salt. however, all you need to do is dive in and you’ll see some impressive, thought provoking work has been put together by everyone involved)
Still nutso busy
When it rains it pours.
My mom has been back in the hospital, with pneumonia, and has just left another scary stint in ICU. She’s doing better, but still is not out of the woods. Along with that, Richelle has been sick with a stomach thing that’s been bugging her, work is still going 200%, and there was some must-do tasks to take care of with Philly Future. With all this going on I missed blogphiladelphia and a friend’s party I really wanted to make it too 🙁
Whadda week.
Piece on insurance posted at Suburban Guerilla
Susie Madrak shared an expanded version of my earlier piece on my years without health insurance with her readership today.
You can read it here. I added quite a bit about my personal background to the version there.
My post joins others she has shared last week in her “Outsider Politics” series.
Been Nutso Busy
Sorry for the sudden lack of conversing and blogging as of late. My day job has been keeping me really busy. That, along with physical therapy (which has stalled btw – I’m going to try epidural steroid injections next), has really been kicking my ass.
In addition to all this, the past month or so, Philly Future started to crash uncontrollably. Drupal’s aggregator isn’t built to scale, in terms of size, as I have painfully found out. It took some major indexing, cache tuning, and aggregator module tweaking, to stabilize things. Along the way I learned quite a bit about MySQL and Drupal. Enough to know that I need look for a replacement for the aggregator or majorly refactor its database usage. Even so, I plan to submit the improvements I made to the community. They’re going to give us a few more months I think.
Some days I still can relate to Chris Gardner’s character in “The Pursuit of Happyness”, where instead of traveling a myriad of buses, perfectly timed, each day to negotiate making it to my place, the job, or school, six hours on public transportation, now it is balancing work, home, health, and passions like Philly Future. A far better situation. But still not enough time to do it all.
Strawberry Picking
We recently went to a farm for a hayride and to pick strawberries. It was a terrific day and thought I’d share these few pics. And yes, before you mention it, we know about pesticides, there were no strawberries eaten without getting washed after that first one got past me 🙂
Digby reveals herself
Whether you are interested in the social software/media as a toolset for activism and participatory politics, or reporting the news, or simply community, there is something for you in Digby’s speech at Take Back America 2007. Take the time and give a listen to her today:
Doc Searls and Dave Rogers Converse
I was happy to read about Dave Rogers’s and Doc Searls’s conversation on Dave’s blog the other day. Both write about subject matter I care about – various intersections of society and the web – and have opinions I respect, if not always agree with.
The back and forth between them is a great and rare example of how two people of very, very differing opinions can converse and connect across the Web.
So color me sad when I read Stowe Boyd’s response. Yes, Dave called him blowhard. But his denouncement of Dave was downright Cheney-like, putting words in his mouth and even calling Dave an “enemy of the future”.
I hope I never get such an elitist, my-view-is-the-only-correct-view way of looking at the Web or the world.
Congratulations Rajiv
Congrats to Rajiv Pant, who has taken a job in NYC at Conde Nast Publications as VP of Information Technology for CondeNet!
Rajiv was my manager (and eventually VP) at Philly.com and Knight Ridder, before the dotcombust, back when KR took risks and had a future. He’s a real visionary who always finds a way. I learned a lot from him during my time there and miss our deep talks about the nature of well.. just about everything.
Rajiv, my friend, congrats to you 🙂
Happy Father’s Day
I’ll leave you with a quote, an excerpt from Jeff Gammage’s new book “China Ghosts”: Becoming her father:
The lack of control is terrifying. Maybe that’s why parents reduce the experience to banalities. They grow up so fast. You turn around and they’re grown. Where does the time go? Then again, the cliches are cliches because they’re true.
Already I can feel Jin Yu moving forward – and away. I hear the clock ticking. I notice the continuous, minute changes in her looks and size and demeanor. Some days I almost want to shout, Don’t go! Please, don’t go. Don’t leave. Stay here. Stay my little girl, my baby, my darling. Stay the child who adores me always, the one who on Monday mornings wraps her arms around my legs and shouts, “Dading no go work!” And who, eight hours later, jumps into my arms and kisses me as if I’d been gone for a month.
My fatherhood will be too short. That I know. How long before she is off with her friends? Seven years? Eight? Ten at the most.
Still, being a father has already delivered more laughter than anyone has a right to enjoy, and greater satisfaction than anyone has a right to expect. It has taught me – forced me – to become my better, stronger self. And left me in fear that, on too many days, I have not been the person I’d hoped to be, but the one who is too tired, irritable and removed. The person who fails to understand that every day with Jin Yu is a gift, that these moments and days will pass like a summer wind. That too soon I’ll be waving goodbye to my grown-up girl and wondering how it all went so quickly.