The Boomer Dilemma: Commentary, followed by Show-and-Tell

I've had numerous conversations with fellow Boomer-aged friends and acquaintances on blogging and "social media" over the past few months. The outcomes fall into two camps: "I want to know more, but I don't have time," and "that stuff'll never last - it's just a fad." The fascinating thing about the second response is how vehemently it's uttered. There's real anger seething behind the words.

I think it comes from we were treated to information in the sixties. It was a time when the walls of patriarchy were being scaled, but not torn down. There was always the "need to know" inherent in any conversation that involved a power structure, and this continues today. The result: so many of us "middle-aged" people are struggling with these newly-opened channels of communication. We self-censor, because we don't want to get called-out for "spilling the beans."

Take a look at Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) for a clue as to how many of us were brought up:

You remember that U.S. National Space dignitary Heywood Floyd is the sole passenger on a very expensive space flight to the moon.


Floyd changes ships at the revolving multi-national space station.



During the brief layover, Floyd runs into a fellow scientist from Russia, and is introduced to her colleagues.


One of the Russian scientists questions Floyd about some strange things going on at Clavius base - a possible epidemic of some kind, necessitating a quarantine.


Floyd uneasily states that he's unable to discuss the matter and hops the next craft to the moon.


...where he briefs fellow US moonbase staff about the need for "absolute secrecy" on the matter...



...warning that the world would experience "widespread shock and social disorientation" if the matter at hand were communicated without proper preparation.*

What's the big deal? Just a 4-million year old monolith, buried beneath the lunar surface. The US finds it and keeps it a secret, preferring not to tell anyone that there's evidence of vast intelligences far beyond the earth.

The secrecy drives HAL crazy, he murders the crew of Discovery except for Dave, who then gives HAL a lobotomy.


Many of us who remember the sixties weren't a part of the counterculture. We were brought up to play our cards close to the chest, to keep secret information for secret's sake, and now we're not used to being so open. We might even be afraid of calling HAL's fate upon ourselves.
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*Floyd even requests that the council members he's briefing sign non-disclosure statements.

Is This the End of Web Sites?

Traditional Web sites may be going the way of the dinosaurs, commentary generated by yesterday's New York Times article "Strategies to Succeed Online" seems to suggest.

"These days, a Web site may not even be the best place to start promoting your products or services," writes Times journalist David Strom. The best place? Blogs and social media, like Facebook, Strom suggests.

Donor Power Blog agrees, saying "In the scheme of things, a web site barely exists."

And JournaMarketing counsels "...the thousands of dollars you spend on traditional website development could be spent on new content."

So, yes, things change even faster in the online world, and I'm sure there are many heads spinning out there from the speed. But look at it this way - new Web applications let us create more and more online, with less and less technical expertise needed. Creating a Web site used to be easy for computer geeks. Now it's easier for all of us.

Check out Donor Power Blog and JournaMarketing for their full take on the New York Times article. And remember what JournaMarketing offers to help you generate new, exciting content: "You could bring on a freelance/part-time blogger or podcaster to work as an extension of your staff, generating engaging, interesting material." You don't have to do it all!

Over time, the online world doesn't get harder, it gets bigger.
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P.S. Is it Web site, web site, or website?

18 Blogger Traits: Uncovering the Secret Blogger Among You

Yesterday, Andy Sernovitz wrote "CEOs shouldn't blog." That probably goes the same for Executive Directors and Board Presidents. Andy goes on to say "The correct people to blog at a big company are people who love to do it and who are good at it."

The trick is to find those people. What kind of person is more likely to succeed at blogging - when succeed means running a blog that posts content at least three times per week, regardless of the audience, amount of people visiting the blog, and whether or not it has advertising or makes money.

I've come up with 18 traits of a good blogger. If I was looking, I'd try to find someone who:

1. Has some experience writing in his or her own voice.

2. Not only voices opinions, but jots them down, on a napkin, post-it note, scrap of paper, their forearm (or someone else's).

3. Has some sort of non-work interest that involves him in a community of like-minded individuals.

4. Participates in exercise of almost any kind, and if she misses a day, week, or month, finds it easy to get back into it;

5. Complains of trouble sleeping;

6. Is equally at home scanning and skimming information as well as traditional "focusing on every words reading;

7. Possesses natural curiosity;

8. Is unlikely to judge negatively things outside his sphere of influence and interest;

9. Is not felled by criticism;

10. Is able to glean useful ideas from any criticism;

11. Offers willingness to take on long-term projects without immediate satisfaction;

12. Seems able to digest, use and comment on information quickly;

13. Can see connections - everywhere - and not get paralyzed by them;

14. Has a high comfort level in letting things "go" that aren't "perfect";

15. Feels that other people are potential wellsprings of interesting ideas;

16. Can offer critiques without engaging negative emotions;

17. Displays comfort with online modes of communication;

18. Can make a plan but is not so wedded to it that they are ready to change at a moments notice because something else fascinating has come along.

I think I'm pretty good at most of these, except for #5.

What's Your MacGuffin?

I've run across an interesting term being discussed on a number of blogs lately: Social Objects. You might think it refers to some kind of new-agey Web 2.0 application theory, but in actuality it's a concept as old as humanity itself. Simply paraphrased, a social object is something that people gather around, trade, discuss. Blogging pundits are theorizing that the most successful social network applications (MySpace, Flickr) must be built around the object (music for MySpace, photos for Flickr.) A "new media" service can't be successful without it, the thinking goes.

I'm interested in a parallel concept that's served literature, theater, storytelling, movies, and television for a long time. The simplest fairy tales are built around objects (Cinderella's glass slipper) as are movies to this day (the "One Ring to Rule Them All" in the Lord of the Rings.) In some rare cases, the object has jumped off the screen and is coveted in reality - just think of Dorothy's ruby slippers in The Wizard of Oz - the actual shoes are the "holy grail" (another social object) of movie collectors. A pair is on view in Washington, DC's Smithsonian Institution.

On the Web, social objects are broad, easily sharable, inexpensive to trade, like photos. In the tightly-controlled, 2-hour universe of a movie, objects are much more specific. Alfred Hitchcock came up with a term for these specific objects that control the plot - he called them "MacGuffins," and then went on to state that they really had no intrinsic value, except that the characters fight, scheme, murder, and chase each other for them. They can set a plot in motion (Marion Crane stealing the $40,000 in Psycho) and sometimes you don't even find out what made the object important in the first place (the microfilm in North By Northwest.)

Sometimes people even kill for the object, which is not advisable in everday life.

Along with the term "social object" goes the belief that you can't rally people and get them interested in information alone. It's too broad, especially online. So the trick becomes finding a great social object, one that's broad enough to enable all kinds of talk and activity around it, but not so narrow that it can be banked by just one person.

As with many aspects of life, finding that social object can be tricky if not downright hard.

I Don't Know What To Say!

Ever since the dawn of movies, and on into the advent of television, we've expected and assumed that the screens we place ourselves in front of will two things for us:

entertain and/or inform.

Until the personal computer put a screen on everyone's work and home desk, we've sat passively and let the info come to us. Someone had to create that info, but those people were way far away, in Hollywood, or in some TV station somewhere. The manpower, equipment, and overhead for creating this info was so expensive it could only be done by people in groups who had access to large amounts of money. And who had successfully broken through the barriers to entry, which were (and in some cases continue to be) quite formidable.

We spectators really had no say in what that info was, how it was created, who it went to, and how it made us feel. We may have thought we had a say - look at how many people have opinions on who wins Academy Awards - but that was all we had. Opinions.

Then a funny thing happened. Those screens on our desks - they started working two ways. Back and forth. Like the postal service at first, then in ways that started to eclipse the status quo. And we were not ready for that. Especially since we were waiting for those screens on our desks to talk to us in the same old way.

We're so used to movies and television that we don't remember - because most of us were around when they began - the time when those screens didn't know how to talk to us.

Take D.W. Griffith. Before he started directing movies at the beginning of the 20th century, the few narrative, story telling films were short, static affairs. Visionaries like Georges Melies and Edwin S. Porter experimented with telling some wild tales, but they kept the camera locked down in one spot, basically filming the story as if it was being presented on stage. It took D. W. Griffith, director of the controversial Birth of a Nation and Intolerance, to start presenting movies to us that were governed by a language, a grammer, in which establishing shots, close ups, different camera angles and film editing which laid the basis for a brand new way of communicating.

According to the Wikipedia entry on Griffith:
Whether or not he actually invented new techniques in film grammar, he seems to have been among the first to understand how these techniques could be used to create an expressive language.

We've forgotten how big this was. We're so used to this kind of storytelling, we accept editing and closeups and all that intrinsically - we never notice the nouns and verbs being used - we just understand the meaning that's presented to us.

Why do I go back so far and explain this? I was thinking how, now that the costs of getting the information out to people is so much lower than it has been for 100 years, many of us assume that the Web and the Internet are there on our screens to do exactly what Gone With The Wind, Star Wars, and the CBS Evening News have been doing. Informing and entertaining us, while we sit passively.

Is it any wonder, then, that so many people aren't at all sure how to actually USE these new tools? Are we asking people too much when we get frustrated that they don't immediately grasp the immense capabilities they have in their hands? Are we expecting them to be like Orson Welles, who once said about RKO Studio "This is the biggest electric train set a boy ever had!" - and then go on to create the Internet equivalent of Citizen Kane?

Some of us have, through years of study and some lucky breaks, enough experience and capabilities with the old screen production methods. We may have a leg up on some of this stuff. Still, it's hard not to be reduced to a younger age at times. We're still like a motormouthed four-year old who, when given the opportunity to speak into a microphone, suddenly clams up!