Alpha Mind Blog

So, here I am all excited to take part in Owyang and Scoble’s cool micromedia meetup today.

I even logged in and reserved my spot.

I have a very succinct and possibly funny video in my camera.

In my bag.

Next to me.

With no stinking firewire card to capture it.

With at least 25 minutes between me and the nearest firewire.

With a client having an emergency that’ll occupy me for the next three hours.

With the meetup 2.1 hours away.

Sigh.

But I’m stubborn and I’m participating anyway. Read on:

The future of media is where these kinds of connections will actually work for nearly all the people who attempt them.

Sigh.

Then again, the future of communications will continue to be largely asynchronous.

And so, how about those of you who come by here subscribing to my feed so that tomorrow you can come back and see my succinct and possibly funny video?

Later y’all. Bissoux.

And while you wait you could sample some of my other videos, here and here.

So, I was more than half right.

When I cornered Hugh at Tuesday’s geek dinner, he told me that while he’s not a great fan of Hunter S. Thompson, he really likes Ralph Steadman, the illustrator of Fear and Loathing. Which after all was what I really had in mind.

I enjoyed Hugh’s talk about his work in his video with Scoble.

Aha! I think I’ve discovered one of the keys to Hugh’s more incomprehensible cartoons. Today he used the phrase “bad craziness,” then qualifies said craziness as being “most of it positive.” If I remember (and I have a nasty good memory), “bad craziness” is a caption or thought balloon or something in one of the original illustrations for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

Come clean, Hugh! Fear and Loathing has admitted to keeping Hugh MacLeod in his back pocket. Will you admit to keeping Fear and Loathing in yours? Or at least in your brainpan? Sometimes the similarity between your cartoons and those in the book is scary. (For that matter, your ‘toons themselves are scary. But I love ‘em.)

So I’ve been YouTubing for 3 months. Where has the time gone?

That’s not a trivial question.

In my e-book Unfashionably Late, I talk about how the cost of using blogs increases over time. What is true of blogs is true of all social media, but especially of YouTube. As with blogs, the problem is that a person who is likely to be interesting is also somebody who’s interested, possibly to the point of being easily distracted.

And YouTube offers more ways to be distracted than any other social medium. It offers stimuli and feedback loops in a great variety of time frames. You can converse with friends in chat rooms called “streams” where the feedback is nearly instant. Or you can make videos, and for months afterward watch the views and ratings they receive.

So whether it is quick or slow feedback that draws you, it’s there, along with everything in between—along with that essential element of gambling addiction, randomness.

You can make friends as a way of getting attention, and then find that you lavish attention on your friends at great cost in time.

In my own case, I chose to hitch my own fame to a rising star, LisaNova, and planned to have my first two videos mention her, as a way of riding her popularity. Since then, there has been so much drama surrounding Lisa, with a virtual lynch mob calling for her elimination from YouTube, that I can’t help wanting to follow it.

Worse, I get involved in it. From being a thoroughly fake friendship by means of which, in my first video, I made a trifling joke about YouTube friendship, I have had a lot of communication with Lisa and find myself truly liking and respecting her, more so with each passing week. So I’m very tempted to make videos defending her against the mob.

There is still the little pragmatic voice in my head, asking if it will be worth the time and effort to stay involved in the Lisa controversy. But that voice gets increasingly distant as the charms of YouTube take over. Who cares if it’s worth it, I just wanna do it. I wanna! I wanna! I wanna!

It’s good for me now and then to re-read Unfashionably Late. My own words remind me that I’m using social media for very practical purposes, as part of my business. Also, they remind me of the dangers of being seduced by social media and failing to count the cost.

Social media are potentially very powerful business tools. Unfashionably Late lays out some of the difficulties of using them for business (or any other kind of personal advancement.) It remains for me to work out the solutions to the difficulties.

YouTube will be a superb testbed in which to seek these solutions, precisely because the dangers of blogs are not only all present in YouTube, but multiplied.

Here on the Alpha Mind blog, in the coming weeks I’ll lay out what I’m learning in the YouTube world, and apply the lessons to blogging. I hope that for my readers who use thought leadership as a linchpin of their marketing mix, the benefit, in learning to use social media effectively, will be great.

Better to save his disappointment for when he gets back. I got all excited when he blogged that Kathy Sierra was back to blogging.

Oh how I wish it were so. Lee posted a link to Kathy’s last post from April, when she quit. Perhaps he hadn’t seen it.

It’s not nearly as funny as an Elvis sighting. Because so many of us truly want her back.

Sniff…

Andrew Cline on How to Write a Letter to the Editor.

I… Well… I just… Gosh… I have nothing to add!

Powered by ScribeFire.

Yes, I am in awe of Matt Mullenweg. Not only has he created a superb blogging tool, but the dude can think, too.

Photo Matt » Meaningful Overnight Relationship

What I find most interesting about this post is that reporters should permit themselves to have the “patterns” Matt mentions and not do everything in their power to overcome them. Why do we get tired of reading magazines? Because they become predictable precisely by thinking in terms of the patterns that sell.

The interesting ones think about the patterns that have sold, and how to use them as hooks to shift our mental models. So, find a start-up story in which all the stock ingredients are there (garage, overnight success, desk made out of a discarded door, yadda), but where a key element is completely foreign, say, the entrepreneur is a woman of 60. Now you have a story.

Powered by ScribeFire.

Some day I’ll work out how to publish a living, responsive, foldable mind map that will work in all browsers. That day is not today.

So here are two versions.

The Live Map should work in Firefox and IE under Windows. Might work on some Mac browsers. (Your Java must be up to date and you might need to be kinda patient.) Click on parent nodes to fold/unfold them. If doesn’t work on your system…

PDF version will work if you’ve got Acrobat Reader, but is completely non-interactive.

From the BBC, we get the news that Chocolate is ‘better than kissing’.

What’s “better”? How about “different”?

The article defines “better” as “a more intense and longer lasting ‘buzz’.”

I did a little interview with the loser of this competition, and I think he makes a very valid point in his own defense.

“I didn’t train for this contest,” said Kissing. “If I did, I’d be dead meat for what I’m actually meant to do. Sustained satisfaction? Dude, what kind of criterion is that? ‘Sall well and good if you ain’t got no stake in propagating the species. Look here, does chocolate care about making human babies? Not last I heard. I do, so I’ll be doggoned if I’m gonna leave folks satisfied with kissing! Getting folks’ lips together don’t get the job done, knowwtI’m talkin’?”

I know what he’s talkin’. I love theobromine, and chocolate helps me blog. But if it’s something bigger than a post I want to produce, kissing just might be the better stimulant, knowwtI’m talkin’? Y’all who want families, please don’t get confused about this.