This week I woke up tired. I wanted a break. A break from the news, from the movement, from marketing and discussion and the complete chaos of our political system. Somewhere along the line I confused taking a break with being mindless and numb. It's as though even my breaks have been commoditized and corporatized.
Over the past month there have been numerous misconceptions about the Occupy Wall Street movement. On TV and on the internet, the world wide protests are portrayed as a bunch of dred-head, bongo-beating folks talking about love with no real focus. The media eats these “first responders” up. They make for great television — dramatic and a little crazy sounding.
While it might make more sense to the public for Occupy Wall Street Protesters to pick a "spokesperson," part of the idea -- part of the point -- is that we need more equality on who gets to talk, and when.
The Media is Framing the 99% All Wrong. I am seeing a lot of people referring to the Occupy Wall Street protest as the potential start to a “liberal tea party”. It is extremely dangerous to categorize this movement in this way. First, the tea party is viewed by many as a fringe group that is often viewed as not-so-educated and extreme. Secondly, by suggesting the Wall Street protesters want another political party misses...
I recently wrote this guest post for VentureBeat.com. And, in a hasty update before sending it out, I misplaced my brain while looking at the new male to female ratios listed on Findpeopleonplus.com. The site lists 9,656,435 Male users and 4,455,733 Female users. At a quick glance, I thought wow, a 2 to 1 ratio! My head said, “that’s almost 50%”, and I quickly divided the 9.6 by 4.4 and got ~46%. Wrong. Wrong....
Google’s “Fine-Tuned” Results People love Google — even if Tom Anderson doesn’t think so. Everyone knows if you have a question about something, “Google it”. Their simplistic, no nonsense homepage won people over at a time when we were clawing our way through Yahoo. And while I would agree, Google is increasing it’s appeal overall with the addition of Google Plus, adding too many features too rapidly and flooding users with changes can be...
Since writing an article a week ago entitled, “Where are all the Women on Google Plus?,” I have seen an explosion of similar articles on many tech websites and a few mainstream media sites all with speculation about the number of female Google Plus users. Unfortunately, I have found myself becoming increasingly frustrated as journalist, bloggers, and pundits are all regurgitating the same unreliable statistics but no one is actually discussing why adding more...
My stream has an attitude and I think it’s time for an adjustment. In the past few days my Google + stream has started to get a bit hostile. The search giant’s new social media platform has created quite the frenzy in the past two weeks amongst the technical crowds. Invites were in high demand as people seemed eager for a shiny new social media toy. But now the novelty is starting to wear off.
