Alpha Mind Blog

One of these first days I plan to sit down and write about why Andrew Cline’s Rhetorica is at the top of my blogroll. For today, I’ll settle for pointing you to his very brief comment about the state of journalism today

I’ll also add LisaNova’s take on the subject (pretty close to Andrew’s):

Lisa’s YouTube Channel.
YouTube.

My last post included 2 YouTube videos. I created the post using Live Writer and Wordpress.

Since it was a nightmare, and…

since I spent an extra hour on the post, figuring out how to do it, and…

since ShandyKing’s post (which comes up first on when you Google “wordpress embed youtube videos”) doesn’t solve the problem, at least for me, and…

since I love Wordpress, and…

since I love my fellow bloggers and want them all to succeed…

… I’m going to tell how I did it.

1. Create the post you want, absent the videos. If you are using a posting tools other than WordPress itself, do all you want in that tool and then send it to WP as a draft.
2. In WP’s post editing page, click “Save and Continue Editing”
3. Click “Preview”
4. On the preview, make a note of exactly what words you put last in your post.
5. With the preview window open, get the page source.- In FireFox, that’s ctl-U (or alt-V, O).
   - IE7 it’s alt-V,C.
   - In Opera it’s ctl-F3.
   - In anything else you’re on your own.
6. Paste the entire page source into a text editor (Notepad or something better), unless your browser already put it into an editor for you. (Opera has its very own editor, how cool is that?)
7. Go to YouTube and get the source code to embed the video.
8. In the editor, paste the code exactly where you want the video to be. (I always put it between a <p> </p> pair, having intentionally left a blank line in my post to insert it in.)
9. Now, (still in the text editor, NOT in WordPress) select all the code from
   - just after <div class=”entrytext”> to
   - after the last closing tag that encloses the last words
   of your post. (Sorry that’s vague, but for example, if your
   last words were part of a link, the “last closing tag” may
   be </a>, while if you ended with plain text, the last closing
   tag is probably </p>.)
10. Copy this text.
11. Go back to the edit-post window in WordPress. Switch from Visual to Code.
12. Select everything in the editing window. Delete it and paste the code you copied from the editor.
13. Click Save and Continue Editing.
14. If it looks right, go on to the next step. If it doesn’t look right, you have something to figure out that I can’t help you with. But my 1st guess would be that you copied too much or too little code from the text editor. 2nd guess: you didn’t get the WP edit window completely empty before pasting.
15. Back in the WP edit window, again select and delete everything. Again paste (your paste buffer should still contain the correct code, right?)
16. Now Publish.

The key was making sure you re-paste the code into the edit window immediately before publishing. Because when you previewed, WP made a hash of the code, and what it put there must be eliminated.

I didn’t say it was easy, right? You have to be comfortable enough with HTML tags to know just how much code to copy from the text editor. But with that caveat, it’s really not all that hard. And it works, at least for me. Whereas WP messes it up pretty much every time I try to do it differently.

WordPress is updating fairly often. I imagine WP will have this problem figured out in another version or 2 or 3. Meantime, this is what works for me.

BTW, I’m using WP 2.3.1. My browser is FireFox 2.0.0.11, running on Windows Vista

del.icio.us Tags: WordPress,YouTube,embed,videos,how

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From Mark Driehorst, a fine post about a problematic issue in social media: lynch mobs.

I saw things get ugly on YouTube this summer, as a virtual lynch mob formed against LisaNova, one of YT’s most popular directors.

Here are two of my responses…

…the serious…

…and the silly (but not a lot less serious than the other, really):

As you can tell from looking at the videos on my YouTube channel, I got way too involved with LisaNova this summer. But it was the quality of her best videos that got me involved with YouTube in the first place. And she and I had had a pleasant exchange of emails before she became YT’s most notorious “spammer” (in quotes because although she spammed I can’t think of a word that really says what she is). So I was quite distressed when she got so much hate thrown at her that she took more than a month off.

I don’t like spammers. Not at all. But I like lynchings even less.If “thought leader” has an opposite, I think “lynch mob leader” is probably it.

Thx to Kami Huyse for the link to Mike’s post.

And, oh, if you haven’t discovered LisaNova yet, here are two of my favorite videos: Teenie Weenie RAW & UNCENSORED, and Breaking News!!!

Andrew Cline’s post title is wonderful. Captures the absurdity of what David Gregory said.

Even Andrew, sharp as he is, mentioned nothing about how politicians contribute to polarization. At least not the first time around. As I was starting to blog this, though, I went back & found he’d updated the post and made nearly the point I was going to make.

For him, though, the press is even responsible for how politicos polarize:

Various of the structural biases of journalism encourage them to view the actions of political actors as mere tactics aimed at winning rather than as possibly also sincere efforts to solve problems.

One way that polarization occurs: Political actors begin to believe this master narrative. So the actions of political opponents become mere tactics and the motives of political opponents become evil attempts to ruin rather than to build (or fix).

To give him credit, Cline also mentions our political system as a contributor to the problem. He could go farther, and mention how [$2 word alert!] adversarialism is built into most aspects of our culture.

For instance, the legal system isn’t usually what’s meant when people mention the political system. But it’s fully adversarial. Two sides lawyer up and duke it out in court.

Andrew is part of a wave of awareness that there are alternatives. His blog does a tremendous service in analyzing how we are taught to think, (an issue I deal with too). But the awareness progresses on other fronts. Take, for example, the innovation of family courts assigning a law guardian to look after the interests of children when their parents are facing off in a divorce.

As Andrew says, "Are there two sides to every story? Yes, if you stop counting at two."

There’s no need to stop counting.

Heidi Miller is an ace. I’ve been a fan of her Diary of a Shameless Self-Promoter podcast for a long time.

Today she posts about Getting your passion up. Passion is the product of energy, and she’s talking about how to stay energetic in a high-demand, long-haul situation like a multi-day trade show. Well, it’s been some years since I “boothed,” but I remember some of what I learned. After you go read Heidi’s five tips, come back here for mine.

Back already? Great.

Before I give you my list, I’ll just say that my tips, unlike Heidi’s, are mostly about what not to do. Because for me, one of the secrets of being up is avoiding what gets me down.

Ok, here are my 5:

1. Live a normal life. Keep as close to your normal routines as you can. If you don’t normally stay up all night, don’t try it at trade shows. (Yes, there are important schmoozing ops, but most of these are high-value only while folks are still sober, which means you can skip the rest and get to bed on time). And if you’re a person who exercises (which should be a normal part of everybody’s brain care), keep as close as you can to your normal workout routine.
2. Take care of your feet. Remember Forrest Gump? Remember Gump’s platoon commander telling him about the importance of clean socks? Well, in a trade show environment, support matters even more than cleanliness. If you can get away with wearing support hose, do it. If you need more arch support in your shoes, get it.
3. Use sugar wisely. Some of us are more sensitive to this than others, but nearly everyone has a bit of a slump after getting a sugar high. Best to let your high come from tricks like Heidi’s and not try to jolt yourself with sugar, which lots of booths will offer. Avoid, avoid, avoid.
4. Use stimulants wisely. As with sugar, so with stimulants. If you have to stay really-up for a long time, you have to pace yourself. A strong dose of coffee early may give you a great morning but a less lovely afternoon. For many of us, the typical Chinese approach is better: cups of mild green tea several times a day, or half-cups of half-caf.
5. Know thyself. These tips are the things that have been most important to me. It took me years to learn them. (And I’d be vastly wealthier if I’d learned about my sugar sensitivity decades earlier.) Learn what works for you, and apply it. Start with lists like Heidi’s and mine, and customize for yourself.

And I have a special bonus trade show tip for those who, like me, are night persons:

• 5.5. Save your energy for after hours, and hire a pro like Heidi to be passionate on your behalf during the day.

Of course, the first 5 tips aren’t only for trade shows, but for any kind of mini-marathon you’re faced with in your business life. Any situation where it’s day & night, for multiple days in a row. And where, when you have to be up, you have to be really up.

del.icio.us Tags: trade,shows,tradeshows,boothmanship,energy,brain,care,braincare,exercise,showmanship

Wei Jian, a physics post-doc at Northwestern, has taken time to read Peter Drucker’s Adventures of Bystander.

I happened upon his post about it and, alas, I have picked up the book again.

Why alas? Because this book’s a mite hard to put down. Another blogger has called it a “gripping read,” a judgement with which I concur.

Drucker lived an amazing life. He grew in up a crumbling empire (the Austro-Hungarian) and was shaped by the powerful forces that drove Europe inexorably toward World War II.

Drucker was the good kind of bystander, the observant kind. He chose that role early (he tells the story of dropping out of a protest march and choosing bystanding as his life’s work), and the result, written when he was nearly 90, is a book that I read with jaw agape and eyes wide.

Drucker’s reporting bears out the saw that truth is stranger than fiction. Only real life, for example, would dare to present us with this conversation in a London merchant bank:

After Masha had left, Vladimir stayed in a corner with his head in his hands moaning. And Mr. Freedberg said to Robert: “Now you see how selfish it is of you not to let Marion Farquharson become Vladimir’s mistress?” “But Mr. Freedberg,” said Robert, “I love her. She’s my mistress.” “No,” said Mr. Freedberg, “she isn’t. She’s the firm’s courtesan.”

As I say, if some sneaky person were to photograph me reading this book, no doubt they would catch me slack-jawed, eyes like saucers, looking like a total moron. Which, come to think of it, compared to Drucker I am.

This book is incredibly expensive, over $30 at Amazon’s steep discount. But I don’t think it was smash hit, and it’s easy to get cheap. I suggest buying a $1 copy from abebooks; then you won’t feel guilty about taking it into the bathtub. It’s that kind of read. If it weren’t for Drucker’s trenchant insights and his deep concern for humanity, it’s the kind of read that would be a guilty pleasure.