Trying to wrap my head around information foraging theory I’m hoping a modern-day forager can help me make some stodgy stuff a little easier to digest…hmmm, maybe not!
The Discovery Channel airs an interesting program called Man vs Wild. The star of the show is Bear Grylls, a real life Action Man who demonstrates techniques for surviving the most inhospitable landscapes.
To accentuate the extreme nature of his adventures — and the diversity of what we eat on planet Earth perhaps — we are treated to the spectacle of watching iron-gut Grylls eat some particularly horrid things, or delicacies depending on your stomach.
Like most of the southeast, Georgia is suffering from one of the worst droughts in living memory.
In a state with such a large population of believers it should come as no surprise that one popular response to this disaster of near-biblical proportions is to take it to the Lord in prayer.
Atlanta, Georgia: ‘Gov Sonny Perdue stepped up to a podium outside the State Capitol on Tuesday and led a solemn crowd of several hundred people in a prayer for rain on his drought-stricken State’ [Greg Bluestein, AOL]. The Governor was joined by other State elected officials [James Salzer & Jim Galloway, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution]. Here is man in trouble, forgetting that he himself has declared the separation of his Church from his State.
The age-old debate about God and State aside, as one who frequently stumbles in his own walk I found it disturbing to watch the Governor lead the gathering in prayer. I wondered, “Why don’t any of the faithful have umbrellas? You would think at least one of them would have turned out with a raincoat on, wouldn’t you?”
An interesting post on Social Media Explorer‘Deconstructing Second Life’ questions the value of Second Life based on a review of the virtual world’s demographics:
The demographics show 8.5 million users, but only 561,000 of those are “active.” While nearly 40 percent of the active ones are age 25-34, only 26 percent are from the United States (with Brazil a distant second a 8.5). The numbers show 57 percent of active users are male…
Hmmm…If 15,000 or so bloggers who are taking part in this day of “mass participation” represent a pathetically small percentage of the total number of bloggers who regularly publish then the 15 million or so readers who could be potentially reached should not be overlooked. For some reason the cynic in me thinks it won’t be.
For my part I don’t want to create more waste in the blogging ecosphere by writing about something simply because everyone else is doing it, not really having anything to say except to note my wariness of anything that smacks of groupthink.
Besides, there will be so much to choose from that it seems the best I could do is find those posts I like best and comment on them, list them here perhaps. That and suggest you stop wasting energy too.
The sweet irony of unrequited love for my efforts to understand the recursive nature of blogs has not reached the point at which I realize my efforts might be better spent researching something else.
One of the benefits of chasing your tail is that in the process there is so much interesting stuff to discover and think about, all wonderful distractions from the bitter irony that if I am ever successful in my quest I’ll finish up kissing my ass good-bye.
And so I discovered Dr. Richard Barbrook who recently published what looks like a smashing book, Imaginary Futures. I am setting this aside to study more closely because the thesis is fascinating and there is something about the overall feel of the thing that resonates with me, something retro maybe?
I came across a new social network called projectstars, yet another killer startup. The site touts “blog for stock in the largest enterprise business blogging network” as if to suggest the potential payoff for participation might be worth the absolutely mind-numbing prospect of having to fill out yet another blessed profile first.
Wired posts The See-Through CEO that explores the advantage corporate top-dogs gain from understanding and managing transparency as a strategic tool. The article weighs the pros and cons of radical transparency — as questionable a term as “totally honest” as if to suggest there are degrees of integrity – and cites some examples worth thinking about.
In discussing the strategic potential of CEO transparency Clive Thompson makes this interesting point which should resonate with business bloggers who consider such lofty things to their own advantage:
Google is not a search engine. Google is a reputation-management system. And that’s one of the most powerful reasons so many CEOs have become more transparent: Online, your rep is quantifiable, findable, and totally unavoidable. In other words, radical transparency is a double-edged sword, but once you know the new rules, you can use it to control your image in ways you never could before.
Why don’t we ditch the tautology “radical transparency” and opt for something that more accurately reflects what really goes on in the C-suites of many corporations? How about “opacity” instead?
At least then we can honestly frame a discussion about about the degrees of filtering that are appropriate for those areas of business which properly belong out of the public domain. We can also begin to examine the dubious motivations for those who choose to adopt “openness” as a means of obscuring the truth, managing reputations that may not withstand the tests of real integrity.
I followed the posts soon realizing that the recruiting bubble and the librarian bubble have [or had depending on your point of view] much in common. The blogs, the personalities, the relationships, the tensions, the idealism, even surviving the space — The NextGen Librarian’s Survival Guide, sound familiar? It all resonated with me. More, they write, read and link to really good stuff!
To the extent that I have gotten so much from following this meme I wanted to share it with you! Enjoy.
Comebacks...