19 Aug 2009
11:11 a.m.
Next: Is This Trust? on 23 Aug
Previous: Two More Webinars on 5 Aug
1 photo attached to this post.
Open Tabs 3
Tagged opentabs , socialmedia , sxsw , sxswi , toread
Time to clean out those tabs and share some good reads.
It is time for a semi-regular installment of Open Tabs - a post where I share with you the web pages that are keeping tabs open on my browser. (Actually, I cheat now and save my opentabs to Delicious, you can see what I'm culling from there.)
SXSW Panel Picker. Yep, I submitted a panel proposal for SXSW and it was accepted (along with 2200 others) to the round of voting. Voting counts for 30% of the panel evaluation and I'm asking for you to register, give the panel a thumbs up and leave a comment.
We'll Know When We Get There has a wonderful post titled Sincerely, John Hughes. The blogger was pen pals with John Hughes in the 80s and she shares some wonderful moments of what it was like to have a relationship with one of the great storytellers of our youth.
I asked him if he would be my pen pal.
He said yes.
"I'd be honored to be your pen pal. You must understand at times I won't be able to get back to you as quickly as I might want to. If you'll agree to be patient, I'll be your pen pal."
It makes me miss my days of having pen pals. Sending actually letters to Spain and Australia and waiting for a response. Facebook is great and I wouldn't trade my online communications, but I would love a letter or two with stamps and signatures.
For a year or two, I've been supplying my friend Dave Coustan with hehs for his Friday Heh posts. In return he sends me gems like Maker's Schedule vs. Manager's Schedule by Paul Graham. He explores how makers (programmers and writers) need to schedule their work and how they can still function in a world full managers.
There are two types of schedule, which I'll call the manager's schedule and the maker's schedule. The manager's schedule is for bosses. It's embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day cut into one hour intervals...
Most powerful people are on the manager's schedule. It's the schedule of command. But there's another way of using time that's common among people who make things, like programmers and writers. They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can't write or program well in units of an hour. That's barely enough time to get started.
Josh Sternberg on Mashable shared an essay taking lessons from Phish (the band, not the food) and applying them to Twitter and Facebook. Lessons include "adapting to the community"
If the fans didn’t push the product, Phish or The Dead (and to a different extent, films like “Star Wars” or “Star Trek” where the audience literally dictated the earnings potential) wouldn’t have been able to evolve.
and that "fan communities are about the fans."
Each of these bands has a rabid fan-base that were early adopters of technology, evangelizing the music and spreading the gospel of front men Jerry Garcia or Trey Anastasio. Sounds a bit like the early adopters of Twitter, peddling the service to friends, family and clients, while at the same time praising Ev and Biz and Jack as the Internet version of The Beatles, right?
Fourth Fiction did a series of Literary Dares on their blog based reality show for readers and writers. Yes, a blog based reality show. Go check out some of the fun writing projects the contestants participated in.
Occasionally I'll learn about a company and want to run away from home and join them. After reading through the Netflix guidelines on their company culture, I'm ready to work there. 128 slides that will have you salivating at the chance to work in a place that values Freedom and Responsibility.
Finally, I don't know how it took me almost six months to get to this post by Ian Lurie, but Anti-Social Media has some great thought starters and makes me want to raise my glass and say, "Here, here!" (Or is it "Hear, hear!")
Social media is not some phenomenon that's unique to the online world.
It is not a revolution in marketing.
It is not the Way To Instant Millions In Your Inbox. It takes time.
It is not a substitute for other marketing tactics. Tell me that and I'll punch you, or at least bat at you feebly (I'm kind of a wuss).
So that's a small selection of my open tabs today, what have you been reading?
leah wrote 2 years, 5 months ago:
Thanks, Annitah!
Maybe we need to do some modern matchmaking for pen pals and get the mail going again.
Ian O'Dea wrote 2 years, 5 months ago:
The whole pen pals thing reminds me of something from my childhood. Back when I was in elementary school, my class became pen pals with a corresponding class at a different elementary school in a town about half an hour away. Due to the close proximity, at the end of the year we went to go visit them, so I got to meet my pen pal (who had been putting Star Wars stickers on all of his letters to me), which was pretty cool.
Fast forward about half a decade: my family is moving. We settle down, I make some friends, finally establish a new network of people I know. This one kid and I become pretty good friends, we hang out every once in a while (we weren't the best of friends, but every time we saw each other outside of school we'd run off to one of our houses and play video games through the night). A year or so later, my mom pulls out a box of old stuff from elementary school, including the letters from my pen pal.
Not only had we moved to the town that they were coming from, but the name on them was this kid I had unknowingly become friends with! I guess fate is just weird like that.
Leah Jones wrote 2 years, 5 months ago:
Ian, I love that story!
I had a pen pal in Spain all through college and after. We wrote for years. Then I moved to London, so I dropped her a note to see if we could meet while we were in the same continent. Turns out she'd also moved to London and we got to get together for dinner!
Aviva (nymphchild) wrote 2 years, 5 months ago:
Pen pals. I grew up in the former GDR (East Germany). We all had to learn Russian in school. And as it was we were also asked to start pen pal teams with Russian students. We loved their first letters as they usually enclosed little pictures that changed from one scene to another when moved back and forth and as they used the most beautiful stamps. But I never got really into a close pen pal relationship as our worlds were so very different. It was until much later that I picked up a pen pal friendship via a literature board and it lasted long enough to write a fantasy story together. She managed to turn me from only artist to artist and writer. Though we cheated, we used email and snail mail for the writing.
Pattie wrote 2 years, 5 months ago:
I wrote to Scott Baio when I was about 12 and asked him to be my pen pal. He never wrote me back. I was heart broken.
In high school I was pen pals with a girl in Canada. I think we met up through an ad in either Star Hits magazine or some other magazine. She was totally awesome, but once high school was over I never heard from her again. If I get a response from the girl who may be her that I found on Facebook I'll let you know.
1
Anittah wrote 2 years, 5 months ago:
All great stuff! Thanks for sharing. Am particularly excited to dig into Maker's Schedule v. as part of my life is as a Manager and the other part is as a Maker. Your snip put into words that which previously was simply temporal tension on my part.
I, too, miss pen pal days, particularly the joy felt on a slow summer day in small town Indianny once the newest Sweet Valley High book from the library was already read ... to stop by the cool post office and pick up a letter from a far flung friend and read and re-read it while splayed out on wall-to-wall carpeting as the central air chugged away at home... Mmm. Good times.