"Raw information will become not just a commodity, it will be a nuisance"

Chris and Malcolm are both wrong...

The title says.

Once in a while I come across smart people (online only, since you know, we moms are notoriously boring and mundane in real life, and many may even suspect that we have few braincells left so we don't get engaged in intelligent conversations, in real life - AND that, my friend, was said with a sarcastic tone through gritted teeth, so don't you mommy police out there flame me!) who I really really want to meet in real life. I found one today

Brad Burnham at Union Square Ventures.

His latest post on the Union Square Ventures blog, Chris and Malcolm are both wrong, is the most elucidating, thought-provoking, argument against both Chris Anderson's glossy, wrapped-nicely-in-a-package theory of "Freeconomics" and Malcolm Gladwell's critique of Anderson's book, Free, in which the theory was mapped out, supported with anecdotal examples (a la Gladwell's own books?!), packaged, and sold, NOT for free, not any more.

I enjoyed reading Gladwell's books, but am always wary that easy reading and interesting stories that make you go "A-Ha" do not rigorous research/theorization made. Although I have not had a chance to read Anderson's book, Free, I have read enough articles summarizing the thesis, AND his previous book, The Long Tail, to also be wary of the same thing.

So, thank you indeed to Mr. Burnham for the article in which his critique of both is summarized in this, ok, granted, nicely-packaged and highly quotable, paragraph

My frustration with the debate about Free is that it seems like a last ditch effort to fit the internet economy into the familiar framework of the industrial economy. That isn't going to work. Free is not a pricing strategy, a marketing strategy, or the inevitable consequence of a market with low variable costs. It's a symptom of a much more fundamental economic shift. Until we agree on what resources are scarce and have a framework for how they will be allocated in the future we are not just talking past each other, we are talking about the wrong things.

Mr. Burnham's argument is that the new currency is ATTENTION (and participation), and it does not come free. Hence the "fundamental shift of economy".

There is an exchange of value between users, the creators of the raw material - data, content, and meta-data, and the network where that data is converted into insight. This exchange is still governed by the basic laws of economics but the currency is not dollars, it's attention. The network that takes attention and converts it into insight is also quite different than a traditional firm.

Once again, per my usual excitable nature, I would quote the entire post if I could. Probably better if you take the time and check out the entire post on the Union Square Ventures blog.

AND the last but the not the least, at least in my book

NEVER once did he mention "paradigm shift". THANK YOU MY GOOD SIR!

***Another great, and very useful, quote, that is absolutely t-Shirt Worthy!***

"Raw information will become not just a commodity, it will be a nuisance."

(Thanks to @leftunderbooks)

Goodies! A debate!! Timeline of the chain of debate between He said, He said:

Chris Anderson finally published his book, after he pre-released it to reviewers, Free: The Future of a Radical Price, this summer. (It costs $26.99 on Amazon! WTH?!)

Malcolm Gladwell wrote a review for New Yorker, debunking Mr. Anderson's entire thesis, using, for example, YouTube's failure to make a profit as fodder, titled: "Price to Sell: Is Free the Future?" Mr. Gladwell's answer is not surprisingly, NO.

The Business Insider immediately posted a long article, praising Mr. Gladwell's critique of the hole-ly thesis, "It's about time."

Finally, a smart person who is widely considered cool calls b.s. on Chris Anderson's popular argument that everything should be free.

The glee, oh, the glee.

Mr. Anderson also started engaging Mr. Gladwell in a friendly intellectual debate on his blog: "Dear Malcolm, Why So Threatened?" (If you ask me: the title itself is not very friendly at all...)

Armageddon is here: Twitter is down and Fail Whale is not even there?!

I can't believe I am saying this, but I wish Fail Whale will come back soon!

We miss you, Fail Whale! We will never been mean to you and call you names again! Just come back!! You are so much better than a lot of other scenarios, we have now realized!

So... by now you have heard, or tweeted, oh, no, NOT tweeted, but left frantic comments on Mashable.com or Techcrunch.com or other websites where Social Media lovers hang out, after they have tweeted and Facebooked their hearts out, but still have something more to say.

Mashable is keeping a tab on the impending doom of humanity through this post:

Facebook Down. Twitter Down. Social Media Meltdown.

Thanks to our friend with the impossibly high cheekbones (I will need to write a blog about these cheekbones one day. I wonder whether it can cut through a piece of tissue? And what's up with the oh-so-appropriate and I-wish-my-dad-had-the-same last name, CASHMORE? Luck of the draw, I guess. But isn't illegal in the cosmic sense to be lucky in both the departments of Cheekbones and Family Names?), we have been kept abreast with the development of Armageddon in the making:

Twitter Down Due to Denial of Service Attack (DDoS)

Now, my friend, is the time to panic!!!!!!! The sky is falling. The sky is falling!!

The sudden influx of Twitter refugees to Facebook site, wherelse are we going to post constant updates and complain about our frustrations that Twitter is DOWN, and also to strive to be the first ones to announce the DDoS attack on Twitter? has caused Facebook to go down as well.

The cyber terrorists could not have planned it better.

So now people, with their usual outlets having disappeared, have flocked to Mashable and Techcrunch to share their glib comments. On the one Techcrunch post, there are now more than 400 comments. And several Mashable posts dedicated to "Twitter Down!" have also received hundreds of comments. Most of them are like this:

"Yup. Still down."

(Thank you very much. Otherwise I would not have been able to find out on my own!!!!)

It has also become a fun sport to ponder who the Cyber attacker(s) may be:

Hugo Chavez? Iran? The Vatican?

My bet is on The Birthers, who are mad as hell because we all made fun of them mercilessly on Twitter. (Even Ann Coulter made fun of them, which made me feel kind of sorry for Birthers...)

But without Twitter as the forum, AND without the appropriate HASHTAGS #TwitterDown #DOS #WHOISBEHINDTHIS #TWITTERDDOS, the "Who Done It" game is just NOT the same...

By now some of us have gotten a rude awakening: Just how much YOU ARE obsessed with Twitter. Like the required cup of morning coffee.

CAN'T --- FUNCTION --- WITHOUT --- IT ---

Speaking of coffee, I think I am heading downstairs to Starbucks so I can talk to random strangers about this new social phenomenon called "Life Without Twitter"... And also get myself a cup of coffee while I am at it.

p.s. F*ck it! I knew it! As soon as I clicked on "Publish Post", Twitter came back. Great. Now I just seem more a dweeb than I actually already am by publishing this AFTER THE EFFECT. Stupid Twitter...

p.p.s. I take it back. I love you Twitter. Don't ever leave me like that again, ok?

p.p.p.s. Ooops. No. Twitter is STILL down. Yes! ... Oh. No. *sobs* Come back!

I GTalked my kid to ask him what he would like for breakfast today...

As over-thinking, ironically introspective, neurotic, obsessively over-analytical as I am, this incident strikes me as seminal. SEMINAL. Mark it on the calendar.

We have all seen those cartoons, parodying the increasing importance of texting in the life of teens and even preteens, showing kids texting each other while sitting next to each other on the sofa, or kids and parents texting each other while in the car, or family members texting each other while around the table, TXT "Could you pass the salt please?"

We all laugh. Then we tsk tsk and exclaim, "What the world has come to?", while simultaneously congratulating ourselves for not being like the characters as depicted in the cartoons. And then we worry that it may become a reality. It is in some way part of reality, we begrudgingly admit to ourselves.

It happened on a Saturday morning towards the end of a school year, the rare time when we did not have any place to rush to and my son was playing the ever popular Runescape on the computer in my study. Normally, it requires a lot of yelling back and forth, impatience, frustration, foot-stomping, indignation, accusations of ingratitude and false accusations for breakfast to be served. Since I had my laptop working in the kitchen, I thought, "Hey, why not Gtalk him?"

Ping. "What do you want for breakfast?"

Ping. "What the..." "Mom, is that you?"

Ping. "LOL. What do u want for bf?"

Ping. "Pancake pls."

It soon evolved into a Q&A session where the 11 yo asked me some words he'd learned from his fellow game-players but instinctively knew were "bad words" that he should not use. First right up:

Ping. "What does Jizz mean?"

Ugh, Jesus. Why can't his father be doing this? "You don't want to know."

Ping. "It is close to jazz."

"Believe me. It is not."

Ping. "tell me tell me tell me tell me tell me tell me tell me tell me tell me tell me tell me tell me"

Fine. "Have you learned reproductive organs in your health education yet?"

"No. But 6th graders did. We didn't go."

I explained that he would learn about it when he has sex education in the 6th grade. Upon that, he said, "Yikes!" in spoken language which I could hear from the kitchen.

For good measure, I emphasized that it is NOT a shortened form for when you want to say "Jesus!"

Then we moved onto:

"Mom, what does f-g mean?" "It is banned from this other site." "People would say this to me whenever I kill [their characters]."

Well, the usage originated from The World of Warcraft, I believe. "You know the word 'gay' and how we agreed that we would not use it to make fun of people?" "There's this word that is even worse than 'gay'"

"Oh. I know that word."

Me. Thinking. "How the hack does he know? Where did he hear it? And who the F called my kid that word?!"

Somehow it does not seem as lecture-y through Gtalk to make him promise he would not use this word. No matter how common an expression it has become in this game or anywhere else. It is a principle thing.

Although I can only hope that he keeps his promise when I am not around, which will happen more and more often now that he's 11 going on 30, I am glad that we had this chance to talk. So, so what it is through Gtalk?

Wired article struck a cord and so I am copying and pasting the whole thing...

Ok. I am not really going to do this. But I just want to do something about this article: Scott Brown's "Gag Reflexes" in Wired (April 2009). The online edition has a longer title: "Scott Brown on Stand-Up Comedy, Lingua Franca of the Wired World" which sums up Mr. Brown's theory.

Maybe crumple up the page and eat it. But I already promised my husband that I will refrain from wrinkling up any magazine pages before he's done with them. (Ok. I am attempting to be funny here. If you read Mr. Brown article, you would understand why I feel exposed, caught in the act of trying to be funny. To earn more currency in this new economy...)

Is it wrong to want to quote an entire article really? Ok. Maybe not 100%. I don't really care for the examples Mr. Brown gave to support his argument. But the insights sprinkled in-between, those struck a cord.

I am no writer, and I am too tired (not to mention lazy), and here is my journal (i.e. I will do what I damn please), so I am going to jott down sentences that particularly resonate with me, and be done with it: (Thank goodness for Ctrl + C & Ctrl + V !!)

"... everything is 'material,' and life is one big writer's room, a massive clusterchuckle of witty one-upsmanship"

"More than that: Everyone must be funny. Because 'funny' is becoming a language unto itself, the lingua franca of the wired world."

Always feel this way since I got hooked on Twitter. Sometimes it feels almost like a comedy show writers' room, the pressure is on to be the next funniest. hence wisest, person in the Twitter stream that you can see.

"Humor saturates the infosphere, for at least two reasons: First, a successful joke implies insight, and insight, especially if it's pithy and self-explanatory, is the basic currency of a high-speed information economy. Second, the fundamental tools and techniques of that economy—memory, annotation, contrast, collage—are also the fundamental tools of comedy."

I absolutely agree with #1. Feeling grateful that someone actually voiced this murky concept so clearly in one single sentence. Everyone is a guru of life, and the shallow shall be deep again. Not so sure about #2 since those are the fundamental tools of storytelling, upon which human history has been, and will be, passed on. What we don't see in the histories in the past is IRONY and self-awareness, imo, which, well, make intelligent comedies.

Moreover, it has always been my one belief that a great sense of humor indicates a great presence of intellect and tolerance.

And this final quote may sound like an accusation "Gotcha!"

"If the references are flying over your head, no worries: You can zip over to Wikipedia and be back in time for the punch line."

Like I said, Google is Your Friend! Raise your hand if you have NEVER done this... Thankfully Mr. Brown provided hyperlinks to all the references he cited for the article.

From The Economist: It's not 42. It's 148. The magic number for social networks.

Even on the Interweb, we cannot escape our evolutionary past. According to The Economist article: "Primates on Facebook", some of things that we do to/for each other on the social networks over the Internet can still be defined as "Grooming": you need to ping your peeps, follow up on their status, read their Tweets, comment on their Tweets, reply to their Wall because they have left something on yours. These all take time. So does monkeys' grooming each other.

A while back ago, Dr. Robin Dunbar concluded that our brains simply cannot support a social network with unlimited size: think of having to memorize all the names! Probably only Mr. Monk will be able to do that, but of course, he probably has the tiniest social network known to man... Irony, isn't it? Anyway, Dr. Dunbar suggested that the magic number of network limit any animal will be able to maintain is: 148.

Even though in the virtual world, it seems that we can grow our social networks indefinitely, to a certain extent obviously (say, like, 6 billion, the number of entire population...), the average number of "Friends" on Facebook turns out to be 120. And the number of Friends with which Facebookers interact with on a regular basis by leaving comments on their "Wall" is even smaller: 7. That's it. For men. Women are more social, 10.

Even for Facebookers that have more than 500 friends, the number remains relatively low at 17 for men, and 26 for women.

Here is a nice way of explaining this:

"[P]eople who are members of online social networks are not so much 'networking' as they are 'broadcasting their lives to an outer tier of acquaintances who aren't necessarily inside the Dunbar circle'... Humans may be advertising themselves more efficiently. But they still have the same small circles of intimacy as ever."

This also concisely explains what a "social network" such as Twitter represents for a lot of its users, or Tweeple, as they call themselves. Only that it is even beyond the "outer tier of acquaintances", all the way into the nether.

Power of Twitter got to @RainnWilson whose followers surpassed 100,000 today...

Who says that size does not matter? When I first started following Rainn Wilson (of The Office Dwight the Beet Farmer & B&B Operator fame) on Twitter, he only had a meagerly 60,000+ followers. And that was like, last week. Here is a Tweet that he just sent out, in celebration of the 100K threshold which his Twitter account just crossed.

A job well done. Now he is in the big league, playing with the big players, the likes of Mr. and Mrs. Kutcher.

Mr. Wilson actually often has witty and wise things to part with his followers. Like a prophet to his disciples. Well, most of the popular Tweeple have taken on that quality. And I am looking forward to the day when Mr. Wilson's followers reach 200,000 plus. Then I think he will start growing horns with all that power going to his head...

Celebrities on Twitter: @Stephenfry has the most followers because he rocks!

I cannot believe that in my previous post of celebrities that tweet I forgot about Demi Moore. Sorry Mrs. Kutcher. And of course, her lovely, always good to look at, but probably illegal for me to fantasize about because of his young age, Mr. Kutcher.

Mr. Combs. How could I have forgotten Mr. Diddy? Yes, indeed, you are Diddy. THE Diddy.

And of course, Ooops I did it again. I forgot yet again our lovely Ms. Spears. She has 230,328 followers as of this moment. Amazing! But it does not seem that she does tweet herself. Sometimes. But not always. This cuts down on the fun exponentially.

My NEW fav? Stephen Fry. Mr. Fry has truly embraced the Web 2.0 social media phenom. If you cannot beat them, you join them. And do a much better, top-notch job. I wonder whether that's the Brit spirit at work. He is constantly taking and sending pics to Twitpic, so that we could live his celebrated life vicariously. Thanks much, man! You rock! You will never see this post, but a true fan will not mind. And keep up the good work.

As of now, Mr. Fry has 241,247 followers. Please please please. Keep your lead position. When Ms. Spears has more followers than you do, then we know the world is going to the loos.

p.s. Twitterholic tracks popularity of Tweeple. Check it out. It serves as a barometer of our times. Me thinks. Prez Obama, naturally has the lead. He is the World Lead so he has to win at every single competition...

There has been NO way for us common denizens to converse with celebrities. That is, until Twitter opened the door...

This is Twitter's stated mission (or designed usage) on its homepage:

"Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?"

Here is my observation: most of the people are using Twitter, not to keep their social network updated with what they are doing, how boring would that be? but to keep track of what celebrities are doing in real life.

Because they are famous, anything they say seems to carry so much more significance. A one-word Tweet becomes some sort of cypher waiting for you to discover its higher meaning. Their random observations of life are so much more hilarious simply because they are famous -- on the Internet, you cannot argue that it is funny because of the delivery. This is NOT Seinfeld. "Newman!"

(Speaking of Jerry Seinfeld. Did you hear that he is going to do a reality TV show about marriage? I bet he and his wife are happier than the lot of us because they have a 24-hour nanny...! So what would his advice be? Become really wealthy and then your marriage life would not be bogged down by arguments about who does more when and what...)

Rainn Wilson. MC Hammer. Luke Wilson. Elizabeth Banks. Jimmy Fallon. Neil Gaiman (he WAS already a celebrity in my household, now with the movie Coraline, he IS a celebrity...), LeVar Burton (of Star Trek fame, Yes, the cool blind dude!, and of Reading Rainbow, eh, fame), Shaq (yes, THE Shaq, under the moniker, The Real Shaq), and I am sure I probably miss quite a few. With some of them tweeting constantly. One cannot help but imagine Rainn Wilson tweeting on his BB in between takes of The Office. Does he show his Twitter stream to his co-stars? Do they suggest to him what he should tweet next? Do they laugh at clever responses back to @RainnWilson?

Yes, responses!

In the Twitterverse, you, apparently, are allowed to "Reply to" these celebrities' Tweets. And if you are lucky, if your star shines on you, THEY may actually Tweet back @ you. This stuff is what dreams are made of. And the real stuff that the wet dreams are made of? That is when the stars FOLLOW you back.

Then you will be a made man (or woman). You have arrived in the Twitterverse.

Here is my brush with fame today with a 10-foot pole:

Wil Wheaton, Gordi in Stand by Me, and also of Star Trek fame, although he probably prefers to be known as one of the Geek gods, a published writer, and a celebrated blogger (see: The Geek Gods), lives in the Twitterverse (again, see: The Geek Gods).

In one of his hundreds' of Tweets today, he gushes about The Onion:

"I love the Onion so much, I want to marry it!"

After I alerted The Onion about the raging endorsement, The Onion responded with a ringing rejection:

"America's Finest News Source Politely Turns Down Marriage Proposal From @wilw"

(My seminal role in this comedic exchange can be proven by the timeline shown in the search result, and of course, this picture).

God, I am a loser...

Sushi for you, Obama-san!

The chef did try very hard to make it non-offensive. A friendly gesture really. Look at the USA flag and the similes!

I am actually using this to test POSTEROUS

My first reaction was:

No! Not another Web 2.0 blogging/tweeting site...

How do they expect us to keep up? Very soon, only SAHMs, celebrities, VC guys, and hackers will have enough time on their hands to keep up with all these things.

Yeah yeah yeah. Spam me for blasting SAHMs. I was one for 2 years so I know. Despite all your complaining, you DO have downtime to go online... So there. Be quiet and get back to your chatrooms. (Or, I am just jealous, ok? because I have to work!)

Posterous should thank RainnWilson on Twitter. His tweet I am guessing would bring an onslaught of people to check out the site at least. Moi included.

So do I replace my blog with my own page on Posterous.com?

I am not crying as hard since I do not have attachment to Twitpic or Flikr. BUT, do they support mobile apps?

Posted via email from submom's posterous

#Piqqem now has 270 followers...

It is amazing to see how a Tweep (or, what's the name for a company/entity that tweets? And Christi on Southwest... is she a Tweep or is the Tweet Southwest's?) grows the number of followers. I wonder whether there is a 3rd party Twitter apps. out there that tracks number of followers for selected Twitter accounts at the end of each day. Then we can do some trendline analysis, plug in significant events into the timeline, and do some regression.

The power of word of mouth. The tipping point.

#followfriday and/or #fridayfollow

When does it become so big that it stops being effective?

Once again, I wish I were back in Grad School: so many fascinating topics to choose from for virtual Performance Studies. What would Ervin Goffman have said about all this in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life? Maybe nothing. Can Sociology be applied to virtual societies where you don't see people, rather, you see the texts representing them?

Note to self: Buy lottery tickets. Win. Go back to school.

p.s. Piqqem acquired 3 more followers in the time of my writing this post. Yes, probably not as fast as how some celebrities acquire followers, but still... I am intrigued.

But, wait, there is more!

Note to self: Google is your friend!! When in doubt, Google. Even my 6-yo would say, "Let's google!" when I cannot answer one of his rapid-fired questions. But as always, beware of what you read if the source is wikipedia. Anyhow, did some googling, and answered my own question wrt. 3rd-party tracking apps. No need to go outside of the house: the Twitter team has thought of that from the beginning. DUH. Check out #hashtags to see what's being tweeted about right now. And for sure, soon it will be written up in the WSJ. When that happens, you know you need to find the next hottest thing.

Crowd sourcing to beat the market: the new tag "$" on Twitter

Thanks to Wired, I know now what "$" and "#" mean in Twitter-nese. Yes, I am a N00b...

The enigmatic title "On Twitter, $ Is the New #" serves as a test: If you have to ask, I guess this is not meant for you...

I am ashamed to admit that I didn't know about the search.twitter URL until I read the Wired blog. How handy. Now I know why so many Tweets had a "#" within them. Duh.

Vanity search-ers now have a new venue and new obsession also, I guess.

I like how Twitter is explained as a distributed social network rooter in SMS, yet larger than SMS:

"Though Twitter has roots in the world of text messaging, it's a distributed network. Your tweets are broadcast, and what may feel like a one-to-one communication is actually one-to-many. This enormity of scale has made it easy for individual tweets to blossom into wide-reaching conversations, but it's also made those conversations much more difficult to follow."

So if you want to talk about a particular publicly traded company on Twitter, just add "$" in front of the company's ticker, e.g. $GOOG. And a company is already utilizing this, or at least attempting to. The idea that Piqqem has is intriguing to say the least:

They have "urged Twitter users to adopt the dollar sign tag in order to help it keep track of how people on the web are feeling about a particular company's stock. The plan is to use that data to beat the market and give more informed trading advice." Sourcing the wisdom of the crowd.

It is going to be a very interesting experiment: stuff that researches and dissertations are made of, IF they survive long enough to get enough attention.

In addition, I am curious to see how many Twitter followers Piqqem has. As the writing of the Wired blog, there were 185. Now there are 190. No, 191, since I just followed them also.

Betrayed by The Huffington Post? I want my Virtual Lives separated!

It is clear that I intend to keep my blog anonymous. Not that it matters to anybody anyway since in the grander scheme of things, I AM anonymous: one of the masses, does not matter whether my name is known or not. However, in the unlikely case when someone at work or a family member stumbles upon my blog, I really don't want them to know what I really think about things. I mean, some of the things are better left unsaid, un-discussed. If I could have discussed an issue or a subject with anybody at work or in my social circle, I would probably have discussed it with them and got it over with. No need to use this blog as my "therapy sessions". It is the same as when I leave comments on the Huffington Post. There are acquaintances and co-workers who I don't want to become privy to how I see things.

I made the first mistake when I signed up for the Huffington Post through my Facebook login. Lo and behold, my Profile name is now my real name, and when you click on my profile, you are prompted to a screen to connect with me through Facebook. Again, 99.999999% of the world population will not care or bother, since my name or "Jane Doe" does not make any difference to you. Again, however, in the unlikely chance that someone I know comes across the same posts and the same comments, I don't really want to be "found out."

Ok, lesson learned. Luckily the comments I left were pretty neutral and fair. No moral, emotional, outbursts of any kind. No bawdy remarks. No curse words (since they are not allowed in the first place). I left my first profile as is, nothing to be done about it. There does not seem to be an easy way to disenroll myself from THP. I am lazy. Whatever.

I created a second profile. This time I made absolutely sure not to log in through Facebook and used an inconspicuous handle. Things were going along well. No personal information divulged through my profile. Until just now...

Somehow, the system working behind the scenes detected my Facebook login when I was logged into THP at the same time, and automatically connected the dots on its own. Now my profile picture shows a tiny "F" at the corner and when you click on it, the screen shows my name, that I am on Facebook, and would you like to connect with me on Facebook.

Now the tiny F is a BIG GIANT HUGE F to me!!!

This brings back the memory when a tiny window creeped up from the bottom of my computer screen after I finished with my Blockbuster queue, announcing (not even asking!) that my friends on Facebook would be able to see what movies I would be watching. The window then quickly disappeared before I could click on the button "No F*ing way!"

In the age of social media, Web 2.0, etc. etc. it is probably boggles the mind of those who design these nifty, intelligent, systems that someone, like me, may not want to have all of their virtual lives tied up in a nifty bundle, that someone may still prefer to lead an anonymous life while pouring her heart out.

It is ironic. But we live in an ironic era, no?

I am intrigued. Wouldn't you? How one employee single-handedly MAKE the hotel...

This has just come to my attention that the number 1 rated hotel in Beijing is... Drum roll please...

A frigging Holiday Inn!

Yes, they do have true 5 star hotels in Beijing.

Granted Holiday Inns do get a worse rep in the U.S. than in many other places around the world. Don't think it is because we are more pampered here: it is true that Holiday Inns outside of the U.S. seem to be a bit more than meeting your daily bare necessities. But, Number 1 out of 1,168 hotels reviewed on TripAdvisor??!!

Apparently, it is also the Winner of Traveler's Choice for Best Bargain/Best In Top 25 Cities.

Morevoer, the spread of the ratings are quite convincing: of 165 reviews, 127 rated the hotel as a 5 overall, 28 - 4, 5 - 3, and 5 - 2. Not too shabby. So there does not seem to be any major argument against this hotel's #1 standing.

But still, a Holiday Inn? So naturally, I am intrigued. Wouldn't you? Especially since many, and I mean MANY, of the reviews specifically mentioned the one employee, Storm, in their titles. This Storm is the most famous in Beijing next to Sand Storm, as far as Western tourists are concerned, it seems. And he is much much much beloved. Some choice examples of the review titles: "Loved Storm", "One word: Storm", "Storm makes it great", "Wonderful Hotel, Wonderful Storm"... You get the idea. Even some travel blogs gave Storm honorable mentions. This one employee basically single-handedly made the Holiday Inn Central Plaza in Beijing a gem, stand out amongst all the other similar surrounding hotels. (Sort of like how HoJo Annheim has become a legend and best-kept secret amongst all the Disneyland aficionados...) Storm has taken on almost a legendary status judging by the reviews I had time to go through. It is amazing what this guy would go through in the name of Customer Service.

Unfortunately, I cannot find a picture of him online. Is he even real? Maybe this is one of the biggest Internet hoaxes: that Storm is actually a fictional character? Maybe Holiday Inn Beijing has employed many Customer Service "handlers of white people" and they all call themselves Storm? Somebody needs to profile this man named Storm! I need to know that he has been recognized and appreciated for all those extra steps (literally in many stories) that he took for the guests staying at the hotel. Somebody needs to call InterContinental Hotels Group and confirm that they do take notice of the employee who was cited as THE best feature of the hotel.

Barring the not-yet-written profile/interview, I wonder whether I need to travel to Beijing so I can confirm that Storm is not a high-tech robot designed to carry out the most mind-boggling, highest standard, Customer Service, ever experienced by Western tourists.

When co-workers and relatives joined Facebook, I stopped telling the truth...

I believe there should be a boundary somewhere. I was hoping to use FB to dish with my friends in the Cyber space: sort of a virtual hang-out place where you can talk about things that bothers or interests you on a daily basis, mundane and trivial, yes, but things that shape your experiences in life and make up who you are nevertheless.

Is there a polite way to say Thanks, but no thanks, to a Friend request? Other than pretending that you did not see the email glowing in your inbox waiting for you to respond? "You Have a Friend Request". For the meagre number of friends I have on my FB account, I guess I should be grateful that I have such requests waiting. But I am wary.

Gone is my ability to complain about my in-laws since well, they are all part of my Peeps network. Gone is my ability to curse on FB when their mother joined FB. (Yeah, I wonder why the younger generation hadn't started a mass exodus when all us old farts came rushing in?) Gone is my willingness to post anything on FB because I don't really want to leave any substantial evidence (complete with time stamp) when I am supposed to be working but obviously I am not. Gone is my desire to share my Obama-mania on FB in deference to my Republican Friends (though that's probably an oxymoron?) and in-laws. Gone definitely is my urge to update my status "Waiting in line at the grocery store" when I am allegedly "working from home"... (And, let's be honest, does anybody need to know? And once you start asking this question, does anybody need to know anything that is broadcast on FB? Not all of us have something earth-shattering to share on a daily basis. One can, however, try and have a child every year to keep life interesting and FB-worthy I guess...)

So now I am back to square one. Staying anonymous so that I can be all that I can be.

Oh, joy.

(Comic strip from Inky Girl)

Metablogging: Maybe we are all egomaniacs...

and if we were, or, if I were, I would not be sitting here at 6 am worried about my being an egomaniac and what all this blogging and twittering and facebooking says about me as an individual.

Is it not enough to live an anonymous life? Or, Why is it not enough to live an anonymous life?

I asked myself guiltily.

What does this say about me? Does this mean I am so ill content in my own personal, real, life that I need to create a separate persona for myself in the cyber space? What kind of wuss am I that I cannot do something about my "real" life?

Doesn't "We Are All Egomaniacs" have a nice ring to it? Nice name for an alt. rock band?

Here is what the venerable (or at least expensive) Forrester Research has to say about Microblogs, i.e. Twitter and its like:

"The current darlings of media attention, microblogs appeal to both the egocentrism and the voyeurism of Web 2.0 aficionados."

From Oliver Young's research article on Enterprise Web 2.0 (published in November 2008)

Mr. Young is a fine researcher with a good head on his shoulder, let me preface by saying this. The irony of his comment on microblogging is that, and I suspect that he himself has sensed the irony, he is on Twitter (with 337 followers and not all of them are friends or FOAF).

I repeat: There is NO FREE lunch. Only Freemium.

Chris Anderson (the chief over at my favorite mag, WIRED) is coming out with another book, FREE, this summer. As a precursor to the big PR blitz for sure to come, he penned an article on WSJ, "The Economics of Giving It Away", published today.

Mr. Anderson is the god of generating buzz words (think "The Long Tail") and cool, attention-grabbing titles (such as this one). And this article, like his previous book The Long Tail and the mag that he edits, is an interesting read.

"Does this mean that Free will retreat in a down economy? Probably not. The psychological and economic case for it remains as good as ever -- the marginal cost of anything digital falls by 50% every year, making pricing a race to the bottom, and "Free" has as much power over the consumer psyche as ever. But it does mean that Free is not enough. It also has to be matched with Paid. Just as King Gillette's free razors only made business sense paired with expensive blades, so will today's Web entrepreneurs have to not just invent products that people love, but also those that they will pay for. Not all of the people or even most of them -- free is still great marketing and bits are still too cheap to meter -- but enough to pay the bills. Free may be the best price, but it can't be the only one."

Companies need to find a business model that most likely will be based on the "Freemium" model: Free products and services subsidized by the few that actually are willing to Pay. And the Paid price will most likely be extremely low. Companies just have to make it up on volume. Think all the online RPGs that charge gamers $5 a month so that they can get cool weapons for their characters or customize their avatars. I am not sure how well this model will succeed though since my 10 year-old boy refused to pay, out of his own pocket, for the privilege of making his avatar look super duper cool, after I approved of the expense. "Nah, who cares what I look like?" So he uses the money saved on more Pokemon cards. (Hmmm, where is the logic in this decision?)

And I love this line: "The standard business model for Web companies that don't actually have a business model is advertising." (and here is a cartoon to match).

More on the US Air plane landing in the Husdon River...

The BOOT - The Business of Online Travel: Can a plane land on water and have survivors? Of course it can!

This blog post has many more links to information concerning the US Air plane landing in the Hudson River. It is interesting to view this incident from the perspective of someone from the travel industry. (Again, I am able to do all these theorizing now only because everybody was safe and sound).

All of a sudden, there is a Sully fever: apparently more than one fan site was created on Facebook alone, and this one has almost 74,000 fans! And of course, guess what? The domain Chelseysullenberger.com was immeidately bought and put up. America, you never disappoint!

USAir crashed into Hudson River; Twitter received the first picture of the scene

This is the title of the blog entry: "U.S. Airways Crash Rescue Picture: Citizen Journalism, Twitter At Work". A Twitterer sent a photo from his iPhone.

This sort of illustrated what I talked about yesterday. I guess THIS itself is a great reason for Twitter... Instead of coming to my blog, or emailing everybody I know, or updating my Facebook status, the first thing I did when I got an email about the news was to log into Twitter and read the messages there. I also Tweeted myself.

(All of this, I think, is made ok by the fact that all passengers are safe and accounted for, otherwise it would be heartless to talk about the role of social media in the face of a tragedy...)

What amazed me is the cause of the crash: Birds!

A flock of birds apparently hit the engine of the plane. Wow. Apparently this happened more often than we think.

ABC news coverage: The plane is completely submerged under the water now other than the tail. Extremely scary to think of, "What if..."

The hero pilot's name is Chesley Sullenberger, and according to the news report, he even searched the aircraft before he himself left. Lots of people are saying now that this is NOT a plane crash, but a well-executed emergency landing based on an experienced pilot's intelligent split-second decision which turned out to save all the lives on board. It is refreshing to hear of news where people are praising the airlines rather than complaining about the fees they are charging. On the other hand, I am so glad that Mr. Sullenberger did not leave the airline industry because of the financial difficulties felt by all major airlines.

To Tweet or Not to Tweet...

Upon learning my having joined the latest phenom which is Twitter, my male co-workers asked me point blank, But, WHY?

Why not just use emails if you want to talk to people you know? Why not use TXT? You can email to an entire group of people if that's your reasoning for using Twitter ("one to many" instant communication)

Or, is your intention of letting strangers know what you are doing at any given minute? Waiting in line in the grocery store? Watching TRM at airport lounge?

Why? What is the rational excuse for this? Or even, the psychological needs behind this?

Excuses I use for being on Facebook, despite not having lots of "friends" (or Peeps) nor being a teenager, nor leading an active interesting life, cannot even be applied to Twitter: I can share pictures with people that I know on Facebook, only when they want to know; I am not shoving my cute kids' pictures down anybody's throat. And my friends may not want to know that I have been up to on a daily basis (for some, perhaps once-a-year Christmas cards have been adequate?) , but if they check my Facbook status, again, only when they want to, they can see that I have been traveling a lot more for business and that my husband is traveling around the world for his own consulting gig.

No. The same rational does not apply to Twitter. So why indeed?

I happened to read an article in Spectrum, the less-techy (and more Wired-like version of IEEE's publication), in the current issue: "To Twitter or Not to Twitter" by Robert Lucky (I wonder whether he gets teased for his last name a lot...)

(Right off the bat, the author showed his Newbie status by not using the correct verb "Tweet"... But it's the type of endearing mistakes that anybody over 30 in this day and age could relate to...)

He mentioned his puzzlement over a young speaker's Tweeting about "waking up in the morning now". Any sensible (perhaps older person) would ask, "Why would anybody want to know?" And if they want to know, can't you call them? TXT them?

This new need experienced by the Internet-generation to be connected to the World all the time is intriguing to me, and I doubt that our children ever even stop and ponder at the wonder of this. To them this is part of existence, "I TXT, therefore I am." The real grown-ups say this now often as a gentle tease, but there is truth in this saying. "I am Connected on the Web, therefore I am." A life that is not documented is not worth living.

Excerpt from Mr. Lucky's article:

"Twitter, the social-networking Web site that allows users to broadcast short text messages to a group of friends, has burst into popularity with millions of subscribers. I'm a confirmed e-mail user, but that's so 20th century. I feel a certain pressure to get with it. So, to Twitter or not to Twitter? I view it as a question for the ages—the ages of the users, that is.


It was my generation of engineers that created the Internet, but it is largely today's youth who are molding the social connectedness that is coming to characterize cyberspace. These are the so-called digital natives, who grew up with the Internet already a part of everyday life. They're always online, inhabiting multiple identities, living a culture of sharing and peer collaboration. For them, multitasking is just the way it is. We older engineers built cyberspace, but our kids live in it, and for many of them the technology is transparent and almost irrelevant.


So as a digital immigrant, already an adult as the new culture was forming, I am amazed at what I see. At a recent meeting a young speaker casually mentioned that every morning he Twitters that he has just woken up. Alarm bells went off in my head. I thought about the fact that several scores of people are going to read a message that this guy has awakened. Isn't this is an incredible waste of time for everyone involved? But a more unpleasant thought also formed in the back of my head—the worry that no one would care that I myself had just arisen. There must be some social consequence that I'm missing. An older acquaintance told me that he had been using Twitter and that after a week he had begun to feel a sense of connectedness."

Mr. Lucky referenced two cartoons published by The New Yorker 12 years apart to illustrate how things have changed through the years, and how things have not really: these priceless (and thought-provoking) cartoons can be found here:

"On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog." (A dog, sitting at a computer terminal, talking to another dog.) by Peter Steiner, The New Yorker, 5 July 1993

"I had my own blog for a while, but I decided to go back to just pointless, incessant barking." (One dog talking to another.) by Alex Gergory, The New Yorker, 12 September 2005

Metablogging

I came up the term "Metablogging" on my own in my last post: blogging about blogging. I am a genius.

For safe measure, I googled the word and darn, it has been written to death. So now my hope is to meta the meta, a blog about the blogs that blog about the other blogs. But that has been done also. Search came back with titles such as "meta, meta, meta"... Sigh.

I wish I were still in grad school, majoring in Cultural Studies, or even Ethnography, the Blogsphere is a such fertile ground for dissertation subjects. Even for a Psych major. Darn!