Two-Minute Hate: Tivoli Square Contractor Edition

I've tried my hand at video bloggingbefore, but I decided to try once again. My friend linked me with a story the other day about what J-school grads and journalism job seekers should be doing with their summer. One of the suggestions was "learn at least one other form of blogging (e.g. photoblogging, videoblogging, liveblogging)." So here goes a vlog.

I apparently woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning. I spent all of lunch ranting and raving to my roommate. I felt like my current mood could be captured on video. Here goes nothing. I call my vlog segment the Two Minute Hate:

So many good shows...

Let me pull a Shiroky here:

July 6 & 7 - Sonic Youth
July 8th - Wilco
July 24th - Redman, Ghostface, Method Man
July 29th - Fleet Foxes
July 30th - M. Ward
Aug 5th - Los Campensions
Aug 6 + 7th - Van Morrison
Aug 11 - De La Soul
Oct 8th - Dinosaur Jr.
Oct 22nd - Gaslight Anthem

That's a great series of concerts. Who wants to come?

Look what I woke up to

One of my graduate professors had this expression when he worked at an Internet consulting firm about something that becomes so popular on the Internet that it goes "Mother" -- e.g., your mother either links you or refers you to it in conversation.

This is close enough. Twitter has gone mother.

In Soviet Russia, Book Reads You

Via Yatesy.

The BBC apparently thinks that the average person has only read six of these. Pfft.

1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6. The Bible
7. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11. Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare
15. Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
18. Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch – George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
29. Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34. Emma – Jane Austen
35. Persuasion – Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37. Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41. Animal Farm – George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving
45. The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50. Atonement – Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52. Dune – Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fieldin
69. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72. Dracula – Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses – James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal – Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession – AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94. Watership Down – Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces – John Toole
97. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

Addendum: Best Songs About Sunday Morning

Kris Kristofferson's "Sunday Morning Comin' Down"

The Johnny Cash cover is okay too.

DO NOT USE TWITTER DURING A FIRE

Via AdrianArcher.com:



Brilliant.

Journalistic Ethics 101: To Publish or not to publish, that is the question

Today, the story of reporter David Rohde broke along with the news that the Times and other major news organizations were complicit in a coverup not to report on the kidnapping.

Rohde was working on book concerning the history of US involvement in Afghanistan when he was captured by the Taliban in November. Several other news organizations including the Washington Post have admitted to suppressing the story at the request of the Times to safeguard the safety of the reporter.

As Kristof explains in his blog,

There will be some second-guessing about the paper’s willingness to suppress the story. But i’m convinced that it was the right decision. We believe deeply that news should be reported, but not at the expense of somebody’s life. In rare situations, when the situations warrants, we should withhold crucial information. Our paramount goal shouldn’t be to publish, but to serve the public interest — and in this case I think that was served by keeping quiet.

This is the second time in recent memory that the Times has come forward with information that the suppressed a story. The first, of course, was the less-defensible NSA warantless surveillance controversy in which the paper withheld the story for more than a year during the 2004 election campaign.

In this situation, the paper seems to have acted a lot more responsibly. The life of a reporter was on the line, rather than an issue of public policy. More interesting was the willingness of other news organizations like the Post not to report on the situation. Further, at this stage along in the Internet revolution it's also impressive that no one from within the Times organization leaked the news of the abduction to bloggers or other news outlets less willing to fall in line with the Times. It's amazing that a few well-placed phone calls to high-placed editors and internal memos actually managed to shut down a major story about the kidnapping of an American reporter. The case of CS Monitor stringer Jill Carroll made international news during her captivity in Iraq. There's obviously a market for such news, as well as precedent on reporting it. So bravo to Mr. Rohde for escaping his captivity. The rest of us will debate the ethics of the Times' actions to death, of course, but the good news is that Rohde and an Afghani reporter are both safe.

Twitter faster than a speeding bullet

The Internet is for porn.... job-hunters?

I recently had this conversation with a friend from college via AIM. He was so terrified of the Internet now that he refused to even let me post the conversation (But I'm doing it anyway; I'm just going to star out his screen name and use a tiny excerpt):

6:06 *******.: I just got the ultimate burn.
6:06 btau24: oh?
6:06 ********: Potential employer called me up to lambast me about something in my blog
6:06 btau24: what'd you write?
6:07 ********.: Worst thing... the thing I wrote in my blog publicly was easily defensible, but my internet was down and I thought the employer was referring to something that i remembered a year ago thinking about writing and then deciding it wasn't wise.

All this happened the week before NPR published a story detailing how the new rules of job hunting made Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook essential in any serious job search. Paper resumes? Please. Email? So 2001.

At the same time, how many of us have gotten in trouble because of our Internet activities? The oldest of these problems was the Reply All mistake, but the latest seems to be the teen "craze" of sexting. Somewhere in the middle lies my already-chronicled misadventure of insulting a member of Congress before my hitherto unknown pending interview with her office.

The problem with the Internet is that it's a place where we post both personal details and professional accomplishments -- and these things don't always mingle. It's fine to have a blog to show off your skills as a web producer, but how professional is having a personal blog that documents the ups and downs of everyday existence? Or photos from the last crazy weekend party? Professional-only networks like LinkedIn try to solve the problem that Facebook poses -- by rigidly segregating off personal details and focusing exclusively on professional accomplishments.

There is an upside to all this. Three years ago, the newspapers and blogs were alive with horror stories of employers using Facebook to screen out undesirable applications. Professors warned their students that their career prospects could be destroyed by the social networking "craze," and advised them to stay far away. With this NPR story, at least the mainstream media has come around to partially recognizing the enormous advantages and lasting staying power of social networking in our society.

If you're around tonight at 10 PM, watch PBS

One of my graduate seminar professors, Asra Nomani, is the subject of a PBS documentary that's airing tonight on your local PBS station at 10 PM Eastern. I was at the D.C. premiere of the film last week, and it looks like an interesting documentary. It touches on themes of tradition vs. modernity, women's rights, sexual politics, and the proper role of a journalist in society. Ms. Nomani made waves trying to challenge her local West Virginia mosque's centuries old policy of segregating the praying women from the men.

Definitely worth watching, if you're around this evening.

Relationship between credit score and email domain

If you allow me to pull a Nate Silver...

I was helping my friend check her credit score, and she stumbled upon the fact that the website Credit Karma offers a breakdown of credit score by email domain list.

It's fascinating how socio-economic demographics cause such interesting patterns to emerge. Why is it that Yahoo and Hotmail users have a significantly lower score than BellSouth or Gmail users? Does socio-economic clustering or money-management affect something as basic as which email provider one chooses?

"I Hate D.C." blogger: A Bridge Too Far?

My friend alerted me to some of the Internet goings-on at the blog Why I Hate D.C.. Apparently, a contributor who goes by the handle @M had posted a bizarre rape fantasy in the group blog, and has been being harassed by commenters on the board. After the incident was picked up by the City Paper, @M was promptly kicked off the blog for drawing unwanted MSM attention to their humble little blog.

@M originally wrote:

And she’s just my type: thin, pretty, white with brown hair. A feeling arises in me hitherto fore unknown. I want to rape her.

In my animal mind, I force her against the railing and push into her, afterward tossing her over the side, burying her in the cold and the wet and the deep—satiating, for now, my love for the city, my hatred.

After he assured readers he was not justifying rape, but merely engaging in a stream of consciousness thought experiment in which he was cataloguing some of his more animalistic desires, he changed his tune and started littering many of his posts with references to rape, as a way of defending his right to free speech without receiving anonymous death threats from strangers on the Internet.

One of my grad school professor (now an editor at the Washingtonian) once noted that the Internet was a medium best suited to authenticity. He offered that Barack Obama did so well amongst the Internet generation because he was so comfortable in his skin. But @M (who goes by Animalmind on Twitter) over-shared his strange inner desires and thoughts and was subsequently hounded by an equally obsessive Internet hater. By being "authentic" and sharing his most private impulses, he has attracted the unwanted attention of hateful strangers and judgmental reporters.

@M's authenticity led him astray, even on a medium that invites people to document their innermost thoughts and feelings. In over-sharing in public, @M attracted derision, hatred and ridicule. Perhaps we shouldn't be so quick to share everything with everyone in such a public forum.

Yankees still suck, even if they re-tweet me

Ridiculous things I've tried or considered trying in order to land a political or journalism job in D.C.

1.) Accosting Barack Obama's children with my resume
Status: Untried, but seriously considered

As some of you may or may not know, I wait tables at a chain restaurant in NW D.C. The restaurant shall remain nameless to protect the innocent. Either way, the Obama girls and their grandmother Marian Robinson are actually occasional customers at our fine establishment -- to the point where they were visiting on a fairly regular schedule. I've seriously considered bringing a resume to work and asking the girls to pass it up to Rahm or Michelle or David Plouffe. Points for creepy creativity and persistence, right? I wonder if the Secret Service would actually let me do that...


2.) Friending D.C. journalists and politicos on Facebook
Status: Completed

I've "cold-friended" random journalists whose work I enjoy at the Atlantic, NPR, the New Republic, the National Review, Slate, the Washingtonian, and the Washington Post on Facebook. For the most part, they seemed happy to accept my friend request -- particularly the ones from NPR and the New Republic. One of my status updates actually got one of them to start a conversation with to me on Facebook chat, and I asked about the possibility of an internship.

Result: I landed an interview at one of the above publications for a real position, only to ultimately lose out to someone with more experience. Repeated further applications to said organization for unpaid internships have gone unanswered, even though I thought my initial interview was good. #epicfail


3.) Making stupid jokes @political journalists on Twitter
Status: Complete

When Slate advertised for an internship a few months ago, I tried Twitter as a place to network and show off my wit and social media savvy. Slate seems to be the kind of publication that would appreciate such a gesture. As a result, I tweeted at Slate's Chief Political Correspondent John Dickerson:


Result:: John Dickerson didn't answer me by tweet. Then Slate sent me this email:
#EpicFail2.

4.) Stalking the former Slate intern on Facebook and asking her to recommend a total stranger for the position.
Status: Untried. Came one keystroke away from sending a message to her, however.

Slate again--they are after all one of my favorite online publication. It would be a dream to intern for them. Right before I moved to Washington D.C. in 2008, I was on an internship application binge. I came across this item in searching for information about Slate:

"Based on my quick review of the list of past and present Slate interns, I can tell you that the very best strategy to become a Slate intern is not to know someone powerful or rich, but to know a Slate intern."

Tired of writing boring stale cover letters, I came up with this crazy idea that I would find out who the current Slate interns were (easy, they wrote a lot for the site) and send them a blind Facebook message with my resume, clips, and a cover letter attached, and then ask them to recommend me.

I decided against it, ultimately. Probably wise.

5.) Accosting the appointee to Secretary of Health and Human Services with my phone number and email during her inaugural White House tour
Status: Untried, and not really seriously contemplated

I was on a White House tour the morning that Secretary of Health and Human Services nominee and former Kansas governor Kathleen Sebelius was also getting a VIP tour of the White House. I had a passing notion that I would walk up to her, tell her that I was a young whippersnapper looking for a job in the Obama administration and that I would love to pass on my resume to one of her staff members. I would then smoothly hand her my info and walk away.




6.) Asked the people I was temping for to get me a job interview with one of their clients, and then accidently insulting their client (who is a member of Congress) on the Internet before the interview
Status: Definitely completed

I was temping for a consulting firm and they seemed generally pleased with my work. At the end of my assignment, I asked them if any of their clients (who were newly elected members of Congress) would be willing to give me an interview for an Staff Assistant or Legislative Correspondent position. They promised that that was something that they could arrange. Two months went by and I didn't hear anything. On my other political blog I made an off-handed reference to one of their clients in a post. Little did I know that they had a Google Alert on the Congresswoman's name, and my blog post came up. Also little did I know that they had penciled me in for an interview that very week. I got a hostile e-mail from my former temporary employers, asking me not to blog about their clients, telling me that having a blog was a bad career move, that the Congresswoman had found my passing reference of her "unflattering" and that I had probably screwed up my chances at a job in this town. I got the interview anyway, but they clearly had no intention of hiring me in the first place at that point -- they just interviewed me as a courtesy to their consultants.

#Epic. #Fail. #Three.

The Moral

The things I've learned from this year-long hellish job search that I've mostly given up on at this point are that the rules on Internet etiquette are still being written. The Internet is a great place to network and brand yourself, but it's also an easy place to royally screw up. Further, your mistakes are harder to hide from Google's tentacles and your image or brand is somewhat at the mercy of what other people write and publish about you.

Best Songs About Sundays

1.) "The Small Faces" - Lazy Sunday
2.) "Sunday Morning" - The Velvet Underground
3.) "Everyday is like Sunday" - Morrissey
4.) "Everyday Feels Like Sunday" - Of Montreal
5.) "Sunday Under Glass" - Beulah
6.) "Sunday's Best" - Elvis Costello & The Attractions

More about Twitter: Twitter "games" are driving me nuts

Last post about Twitter in a while, I promise. One thing I've noticed in the last few weeks is the rise of these insipid Twitter games that people have started playing (including former Howard Dean campaign manager Joe Trippi, apparently). The one that is currently clogging up my Twitter feed is SpyMaster.

Now, granted I haven't played these text-based games and there's something pretty wholesome and delightfully retro about a text-based game without fancy graphics, or simulated virtual sex. At the same time, I don't care if you've reached level 27 in a spymaster. The uninitiated tend to demean Twitter by saying, "Who cares what I had for breakfast?" Frankly, I care more about what you had for breakfast than some Twitter-based RPG.

If people are going to be playing these games on Twitter, we need to find a way to segregate or filter gameplay Tweets that i'm downright uninterested in with from other tweets that I am.

Old college pal suddenly becomes briefly noted by creating IAmDrTiller.com

Andy Warhol really was a visionary. He probably wasn't thinking about the Internet with his notorious "fifteen minutes of fame" remark, but how true is it in the days of viral video and Digg? Now everyone is just a heartbeat away from being a viral celebrity, getting a shout-out on old media or shooting to the top of Digg/the blogosphere/twittersphere.


A politically-minded college acquaintance of mine and his girlfriend were unhappy about the brutal murder of Kansas abortion provider George Tiller a few weeks ago. They registered a domain, created a concept, created a tribute site called I am Dr Tiller, and coded it in a few hours. Within a few days, highly rated blogs like Jezebel and some MSM-run blogs like the Toronto Star had picked it up. And within a week, the site was mentioned and derided on the O'Reilly Factor itself (Clip here, Website mentioned around 4:45. No embed is possible, apparently).

It's telling how quickly their site became linked and discussed on both the Web and even television. In a follow-up post, he noted that he was now protecting his Tweets because of the crazies that the O'Reilly Factor sent his way, but at the same time that Jezebel's direct linking of the site brought in much more traffic than O'Reillly mentioning it. Even if O'Reillly has a larger platform than Jezebel (and I'm actually not sure that he does), it still didn't translate to people going to their computers and imputing the URL manually. Linking by another website however, did translate into page visits.

Either way, it's shocking how quickly someone's pet part-time web project can get on the radar and become part of the national conversation and debate. And it's even more shocking how quickly these things fizzle and fade before the Internet masses move onto the next meme. 15 minutes of fame, indeed.

I'm kinda a big deal on Twitter: more twitter followers than following!

In the wake of the release of the State of the Twittersphere report, I wanted to point out that I now have more followers than people I follow.

It seems that from the report, many people start following in the hopes that people will follow them back just to build their own massive audience. The distribution data on who Twitter users follow shows that a huge number of people cluster around the 2000 number -- the limit for people who do not have at least 2000 followers themselves.

I tend to use it for the opposite reason. I think that having a Twitter network that's too big defeats the purpose. I've un-followed Lehman Brothers, the D.C. rapper Wale, and other non-private citizen tweeters for the simple fact that they clog up my home page. People, in turn, have defriended me on Facebook for the simple fact that my status update (which Twitter updates automatically) clogs up their friend feed. And I don't even consider myself a prolific tweeter.

It's an interesting problem of scale about how to maintain a small enough social network to be able to keep up with all updates when there are simply so many casual and abusive users of social networks who only friend or follow to build their own brand.

Welcome, Web Soup classmates

This blog had fallen by the wayside before this month. I even pointed out how bad Twitter had been on my blogging habits, never mind the other blog I tried launching last fall. Luckily Mr. Allman and our Web Soup class have forced me to resurrect it. I've been running this blog since March of 2007. Before that, I blogged on LiveJournal since 2002.

This website has been many things, at many points. It has been been a travelogue, cataloguing my (mis)adventures abroad. It has been an outlet for career frustrations and life (in)decision. It's been a photo blog. It's been a place for political rants and commentary. And it even had a brush with Internet-fame when I was almost sued by an out-of-control libel-happy Canadian bureaucrat. I really showed him.

But mostly, it's been a mundane, sometimes witty, sometimes depressing account of the things that have happened to me since 2007. More and more, it's been a place to put interesting photos, links, and other assorted Internet miscellany. I think I'm going to keep that forum, for the most part. It'll be written copy, interspersed with links, photos and other interesting articles.

As for my friends and random Internet visitors, you might notice an upswing in posts about the Internet, digital politics, journalism and such. That's because I'm taking a Georgetown university graduate class in creating web content. I've integrated the class with this blog. So tune out, read on. Whatever you like.

Follow-up: Now I know why the Facebook ad targeted me

I wrote this post a few weeks ago about how Facebook targeted me with ads that I didn't particularly understand. For example, why Christian singles? I'm not into Christian singles. I want nothing to do with Christian singles nights. But I figured out exactly why I was microtargeted.

In my enthusiasm for the Reinheitsgebot (or the German Beer Purity Law) and in my ironical desire to have things in my interests that were unrelated yet shared a common theme or word, I put that I was interested in Purity Balls. Wikipedia on the matter:

A purity ball (also known as a father-daughter purity ball[1] or purity wedding[2]) is a formal event attended by fathers and their daughters. Purity balls promote virginity until marriage for teenage girls, and are often closely associated with U.S. Christian churches, particularly fundamentalist churches.[citation needed] Typically, daughters who attend make a virginity pledge; a pledge to remain sexually abstinent until marriage. Fathers who attend pledge to protect what they view as their young daughters' "purity" of mind, body and soul. Proponents promote a strong father-daughter relationship as a means to affirm what they consider to constitute spiritual and physical "purity".

That explains it all.

Sic Transit AOL Instant Messenger

I noticed a trend recently. When I was younger (middle school and high school, really) and I wanted to establish a digital relationship with someone, getting their AIM screen name was one of the best (and only) methods of social networking. But with friends that I've made in the last two or three years, I don't even usually have their AIM screen names. That's because instant messaging seems to be migrating to other platforms that are more broadly digitally integrated. For example, Facebook and Google Talk are becoming much more useful and popular --and in my experience, they outstrip AOL as a chat platform.

Consider this: As of 2006, had something like 50% of the market share. Anecdotal evidence suggests that AIM share of the market has decreased as Facebook and Google Talk have taken off. Further, with the development of multi-platform clients like Trillium and Adium, it becomes even easier for people to splinter from the dominant market player (which at one point was AIM) and adopt their chat platform of choice. Even now, Google offers GChat users the option to "Sign into AIM" and access their AOIL buddy lists directly from within Gmail and Google Talk. It has further just integrated video and voice chat into it's chat client.

All in all, the fragmentation of the instant messenger market is an interesting development. At one point in the late 1990s, AOL Instant Messenger was the only game in town (well, for Americans -- having lived in Canada, I realized that Europeans and Canadians do not use AIM and instead prefer MSN Messenger/Windows Live). But with the creation and integration of broader social networking platforms that offer a plethora of other services -- like Facebook and Google -- the Instant Messaging market has been thrown into a state of flux, with different users simultaneously using different platforms and using multi-platform clients like Adium just to keep up.