Over the last week or so, I've unsubscribed from a number of feeds that just weren't doing it for me.  Interestingly enough, what I've been left with is a feedreader full of my friends.  More than half the blogs I subscribe to are friends of mine. 

I could use some suggestions on new blogs to be reading.  Here's some key criteria:

• People who are thoughtful about career and life decisions.
• Anyone who takes Web 2.0 with a nice heaping grain of salt and doesn't get too caught up in the hype.
• People with outside interests.
• New Yorkers especially welcome.
• People with a good sense of humor.

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Why are women always cold?, originally uploaded by ceonyc.

@ptrain just threw on a hat and scarf...meanwhile I'm sitting here in bed in my Twitter t-shirt and boxers. I think she's leaking antifreeze... I'm going to go check the last place she was sitting for neon green liquid.

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Over the last few years, Sandy Sobanski has led a group of Downtown Boathouse volunteers over to Hoboken's Frank Sinatra Park to bring free kayaking across the river.  Over time, the Hoboken kayaking program has become a summer fixture.  This year, the program will become even more permanent as it moves to the Maxwellhouse Boathouse and becomes it's own independent program. 

If you've ever worked with any kind of local government, you know that getting new programs run on public property isn't easy.  Sandy's been at this for a few years now and 2008 was all set to be a big year for her and the new program.

That was, until a Hoboken fire destroyed her and her husband's apartment on January 7th. Since then, they've been staying in temporary housing--a chain hotel... and hopefully they'll be able to move into something more permanent soon. 

Her insurance isn't going to cover all of her costs, and it's going to be some time before she's able to get her affairs in order to be able to get back work. Sandy works tirelessly, without asking for anything in return, to better the Hudson River waterfront and make sure its resources are made available to the public. 

To have this happen to her of all people isn't fair... not that anyone deserves to lose everything like this...  but to have someone who has given so much back to her local community have her own local environment go up in flames...  it's really quite tragic.

That's why I'm helping the Downtown Boathouse raise money to help her get back on her feet.  With nearly 2400 mostly local subscribers, I'm hoping there are enough people who have either participated in some of the Hudson River kayaking, or who just care about the waterfront, that are willing to help out someone who has done a lot of great work for it.  I'll be matching donations from my readers up to $500 to help Sandy out.

Here's how you can help...  even a five spot will go a long way... there's power in numbers. You can make out a check to: The Downtown Boathouse Inc. West Village Station Box 20214 New York, NY 10014-9998 Memo: Sandy Fire Relief (from Charlie's blog)

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• Concurring Opinions
  (tags: blog law)

A while back, Scott Adams wrote how blogging wasn't really boosting his bottom line the way he thought it would, so he decided to make some changes.  He has decided not only to blog less, but also to go to partial RSS feeds. 

His reasoning is that, unless you were coming to the site, he couldn't monetize you as well.  It wasn't clear that he had ever heard of Feedburner ads for RSS.

So, he made the calculation that he could force those reading his RSS feed to come to the site to read full feeds.  In my case, he can't, because I read a lot of my RSS feeds offline, when I'm on the subway reading through my phone, though Newsgator Mobile.  When I like a post, I clip it, and often send it to others or tag it in del.icio.us for later, meaning the link winds up on my blog and I send some traffic his way.

Either way, as an RSS reader, I'm still net positive on total pageviews.  Moving me to partial feeds doesn't make me add pageviews, it makes me completely disappear.  This is the case for a lot of RSS readers...  going to partial feeds will make your RSS audience dry up, engage less, and certainly never pass the site to others.

I kept the feed in my reader hoping it would change back, but he seems pretty set in his ways, so I'm unsubscribing.  I read RSS feeds and if you're not going to publish a full feed, then I'm not going to read you.  It's a shame, b/c the Dilbert Blog was one of my favorites.

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As always, any trend that I notice occuring because of technology's effect on people should be taken with a grain of salt... you know, because of that vaccuous Web 2.0 echo chamber that I sleep in.

That being said, I'm realizing that a lot of the relationships I've built up with people lately have been built up over time, nutured slowly by tiny bits of information and without the pressure of thinking that if you don't do a complete data download on the first meeting, you'll lose the chance to reconnect. For example, I started reading Rob May's BusinessPundit blog (He's now over at CoconutHeadsets.com...sorry no link, posting by mobile) about two years before I ever met him in person. His blog just had to be readable enough for me to think I might want to go back to it again for it to get a tryout in my RSS reader...not a very high bar. But, it stuck, and we both wound up at last year's SXSW conference. Not only did it not seem weird, but all the previous back history of communication between us made the first inperson meeting that much easier. I didn't have all sorts of unfulfilled expectations or bad assumptions... I learned enough over time that I had a much more realistic view of him. Plus, I knew that, even if we didn't become best buds right then and there, our digital connection would keep conversation going, probably enable other chances to meet...It really took any pressure to form an immediate strong link off the table.

The same thing seems to be happening in poltics. I'll bet that when you had one chance to meet a candidate--the one time their election train rolled through your town, your first impression of them became a lot more meaningful. In today's world, we've swung to the opposite. Everyday, you see a new video clip. One day you think Hillary's a bitch, the next day you think she's warm and sensitive because she cries at a cafe hundreds of miles away. And what about John McCain? Didn't we have him left for dead not too long ago... wasn't Rudy the leading Republican candidate at one time? Turned out Rudy was a one trick pony and McCain can haz nine livez.

The ability to hang around the rim...to lurk, engage lightly, linger, subscribe, connect means that we have increased the window of opportunity we have to get to know each other...almost indefinately. I think that's great, because prejudgements are often wrong. How many of your favorite people did you initially have a not so great first impression of? Plus, how much could you really get to know someone on a first pass? People are so deep and complex, more information and a longer window to make judgements can only be a good thing. I mean, imagine if you could only hire employees based on resumes--no interviews, no trial periods...just a small bit of superficial information that corralates little to the lifetime value of what this person can bring to the table.

That's why I'm excited about Path 101' ability to help people get to know themselves better in relation to career discovery, because it will also allow potential employers to get to know them better as well.

• Why aren't you working for a startup?
  (tags: startups entrepreneurship web2.0)

When's the last time you worked until tomorrow and had a great time? How many meetings have you had in the last week with more than four people that went nowhere and accomplished nothing? More than five people? Eight? Have you ever heard your boss say, "Well, if we run low on cash, I'll just take a salary cut, eat less, and tap my savings a little more?" Are you passionate about what your company does? Do you have enough skin in the game where you start to think, "Wow, if we really kick ass, I could buy that car/house/island" or are you kissing all the ass you can to make sure your boss and coworkers give you good reviews during bonus time so you can just pay off your credit card bill? When you tell people where you work, do they say, "Wow, that's a really cool idea" or do they mention someone who also works for the same 55,000 employee company and ask if you know them...as if the whole goddamn company goes out for a huge picnic with "hello my name is" nametags once a week. Has your company ever gone on a picnic with "hello my name is" nametags? Has your company ever done anything requiring "hello my name is" nametags? Is the whole reason for your company's existance to find a new way of doing something or do you find spreadsheets, code, and docs related to your job that date back to 1999 on the company's servers? Do you jump up excitedly when a random ass conversation with someone in a completely different field helps you figure out some problem you've been thinking about? Maybe even leave to go back home or to work to fix it right then and there? Or do you chastise friends for bringing up work? Are there companies whose products you love to hate that you're going to blow out of the water or is it your company whose products your customers love to hate? Do you get letters from customers and supporters telling you how much they love your product? Do you get hate mail telling you how much your product sucks? Do you get any feedback at all? Every actually met anyone who uses your product that you didn't sell to directly? Do you even think that half of those people use it? When you talk about what you do, do you get so infectiously excited about it that, all of the sudden, everyone around you is talking about it, too?

Why aren't you working for a startup?

FeedDemon was the first RSS reader I ever used, back in 2004.

I really liked it, but it felt so disconnected.  I moved to NewsGator because I wanted an automatic blogroll, a mobile application, and I wanted it to be all synced up. 

Then, after Newsgator acquired FeedDemon and got things all synced up, I just didn't want to pay for it. 

I did pay for NewsGator Mobile, which I love, but I wasn't willing to pay anything for synced destop software.  Despite improvements to the interface, I still didn't really love Newsgator Online, nor did I love being unable to read feeds on my laptop while offline. 

Last week, Newsgator took the pricetags off and went free.

Not surprisingly, they're also supporting APML, which means that they're going after the data.  I always felt like the feed reading folks were in a unique position to see who was paying attention to what (as is FeedBurner) and build interesting applications on top of that.  For example, I can't wait to use their list of feeds I pay the most attention to.  Going free and building up attention data: not only very Web 2.0, but also so much more useful to me. 

This is a major step in my continuing quest to bring stuff back out of the browser and onto my desktop in a way that is still synced to my phone.  First, I successfully brought all my Gmail/Gcal functionality out of the browser and enable phone syncing through a combo of Thunderbird and other apps.  Now I'll be able to read feeds offline but also sync those feeds to my phone.   That's great because the browser, thus far, doesn't seem like it's a place to efficiently run things that need applications.  I've also started using the GTalk client and never got much use out of Meebo. 

Now if I could only manage edit/upload/manage videos in a connected client.  Phanfare doesn't have editing. 

Hats off to the Newsgator team!

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Everyone uses the web quite differently, but I've noticed some strong usage patterns among social network, tagging, and blogging users that I think hold true.

The first type avoids social media altogether.  It scares them.  They say things like, "I don't want to expose my whole life on the web."  They can't be found on Google and actively attempt to clean up their digital tracks.  These people are to be avoided at all costs.  Clearly they either a) have something to hide, like a body in the trunk of their car,  b) have serious impulse control issues and if given a Flickr account or blog will immediately start posting pictures of their genitalia, or c) suffer from Usenet related alcoholism, because its all to easy to do a shot everytime someone responds to an annoying thread with "unsubscribe" in the body.

The second kind is a closet social media user.  They've secretly had a LiveJournal since the first time they heard Ani DiFranco.  (Mood: Angsty) They break into a cold sweat anytime they read stories about people fired from blogging, but secretly, they're hoping to be found...to be led to freedom by an LJ revolt where everyone goes to the window, opens it, sticks they're head out and yells, "I have an angsty LiveJournal blog, and I'm not going to keep it private anymore."

Of course, it never occurred to them that they use the same screename on their AdultFriendFinder profile.

The third kind of social media user is the happy medium most social users hope to achieve.  They don't know how many RSS subscribers they have to their Tumblog-- and its mostly people they know anyway.  They read Perez Hilton just as often, if not more, than TechCrunch and edited Wikipedia just once--to erase one benign sentence just to see if it would work.  They like the idea of Twitter, but they only know 2 people who use it and fail to see the value of following Scoble or Calcanis, because they've never met either of them.

The fourth kind of social media user uses social networks to reflect and leverage their real life with worldclass efficiency.  When their cable goes out, they LinkedIn their way to the night shift operations manager at Cablevision, who also happens to share the same music tastes (Wow, you like Radiohead, too!)... Cable back on in 4 minutes.  Everything gets delivered, and expenses get tracked by both their social expense tracking community and Najesh, the Skype enabled personal assistant from Mumbai.  Never alone, this user is always a Twitter or Dopplr notification from meeting up with someone they know, even snorkling in Fiji.

The last kind of social media maintains social media as their one and only form of social.  "What do you mean offline?"  They live in places with the lowest population density to downstream rate ratio in the country--not another man made structure for 22 miles, but they've got fiber to the home.  All of their profile photos have that grainy blue glow of a webcam shot and they don't get it when people decline their friend invites because they're not friends.  "Yeah...duh... that's why you click accept... to become friends!"

Any of these too close to home?

• Education‽Blog List
  (tags: education path101)

• Emotion Without Thought in New Hampshire - Judith Warner - Domestic Disturbances - Opinion - New York Times Blog
  A take on the Hillary crying episode
  (tags: election2008 politics)

I don't often need to blow my nose, because I never get sick. If I get the sniffles once every two years, its a lot. I'm pretty sure I didn't get sick in 2007, so when I found myself a little congested last night I figured I was due. I feel just fine, though.

Anyway, anytime I blow my nose, I think of my grandfather. He got Lou Gerhig's disease (ALS) when I was in high school and had very quickly lost the ability to lift his arms at all. That meant that noseblowing was out of the question....so when I went over to his house to help out, I always had to help him blow his nose. He'd yell at me because, instead of just putting the tissue to his nose, I'd squeeze it, like most of us do. Of course, squeezing makes no sense because if you're trying to clear your nose, closing off your nostrils only impedes the process.

Anyway, I don't squeeze my nose when I blow, or at least, try not to... but everytime I do, I think of my grandfather.

Don Mattingly: The people who want you to vote for him say he was great before he hurt his back. Well let me tell you something: My cousin used to be a math whiz until he fell out of a pickup truck when he was 12 and hit his head on the curb. He couldn't count his fingers after that. Did they let him into MIT anyway? No, they did not. End of parable.

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Don't mind me... I just wanted to say "I told you so..."

Remind  us not to sell Path 101 too early, before it's achieved enough scale to weather big company neglect.

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