Radical Transparency

Filed under  //   gmail   lmw   music   pink floyd   posterous   types of people  

Filed under  //   baseball   bugs   fans   posterous   rules  

Filed under  //   csny   music   posterous   tragedy  

Filed under  //   celebratory fist pumps   internet neuroses   obsession   posterous   split personalities   tagging  

I woke up today wanting to write but not knowing what to write. I thought about diving into the creative capitalism conversation and seeing what I could find in there. I thought about responding to an email a friend sent me about meat and responsible consumption. I thought about digging into some Clay Shirky. But I figured I'd do some reading first and then make some decisions.

A couple of tabs that have been sitting neglected in Firefox the past few days beckoned. Seemed like as good a place to start as any.

I reread a great article about simplicity and ubiquity. I read another article about web services that solve only problems that the web itself creates. And, since both mentioned Twitter, I stopped there and wandered off to see what the people I follow have been tweeting the past couple of days.

As I clicked back through some history, I started thinking about why I post what I post on Twitter.

And I remembered what a friend wrote me when she first read my Twitter feed:

it sounds like you're a crazy person! wtf are you updating people on your minutia? eating stale chips? what???

I told her it was an experiment, that I wasn't sure if Twitter would ever amount to anything for me, but I was trying to figure it out. And I dug it, dug the weirdness, dug people's willingness to tweet just about anything.

But that doesn't explain why I experiment the way I experiment: why I post about stale chips, Art Garfunkel, narrowly averted cupcake disaster, or Mr. Empty Promises.

I remembered some thoughts I'd had about posts of the week.

I had a moment a few weeks ago when I decided I wanted more storyteller microbloggers in my life, and I figured I could make that happen if I could locate a Twitter-fiend blogger that posts his or her favorite tweets of the week. Not his or her own tweets. Not a self-published greatest hits. Lots of people do that. I wanted to find a blogger that posts the choicest tweets from the set of microbloggers that he or she follows.

Ten minutes of searching for such a blogger proved fruitless, so I went back to work.

Later that day, however, I started dreaming about becoming that blogger. Every time I'd check in on Twitter, I'd favorite the tweets I enjoyed most, and, once I'd accumulated five or ten favorites, I'd throw them up on the blog and thank my Twitter friends for posting them.

I took the situation's pulse. I made a point to use the favoriting function for a couple of weeks. I looked for stuff that I thought was top quality. I favorited and unfavorited. And I had a good time. But I realized as I did it that I just simply couldn't count on myself to devote enough time to tweet reading to consistently come up with favorite tweets posts and make them good.

So I shelved the idea.

But I left a little archive of favorites on my Twitter account, and, now that I'm thinking about why I post what I post, I figure maybe those favorites can explain. Maybe they'll illustrate what I love about Twitter and what kind of microblogger I aspire to be.

@loiclemeur Kids look great on Segways while adult men look like sexual deviant people because of their posture

@mriggen OH: (To toilet-mastering preschooler, who's been having, ah, "issues")Remember, you control the poop. The poop does not control you.

@robinbloor Charlie Chaplin once won third prize in a Charlie Chaplinlook-alike contest

@joeyheadset Fistbook is a social networking utility that connects my fist with YOUR face.

@christinelu WTF. some old man from Turkey on FB just edited details of how we kneweach other saying we dated in '92. that would put me at 16 you perve.

What do you think? Is it the storytelling I love? The vivid images they all conjure? The fact that they remind us that funny is everywhere, that life's more enjoyable if we're on constant lookout for silliness and share it whenever we can?

Hmmm.

Well. I don't know. I'll keep tweeting. Someday it'll all make sense. And, when it does, I'll explain in detail on the internets somewhere. In the meantime, I'll leave you with what is still perhaps my favorite tweet of all time.

Thank you Marc Andreessen for posting select dirty tweets for a few days last fall. This one I've thought about, both seriously and for laughs, quite a bit since then:

@PandaFace Girls like her f*** up the good guys and good guys f***ed up by girls like her f*** up good girls.. Never ending cycle.

*Note: The original plan was to post this to moreperfectmarket.com and chalk it up as a dinosaur post. But then I figured why post total ridiculousness on the serious blog now that I have a catch-all crazythought barrel up and running. But THEN I remembered that Posterous, the excellent little simpleblogging platform on which I'm writing unconstrained, has a new feature I want to try. So, now, I'm going to send this email to post@posterous.com, and, automagically, I'll post to both A More Perfect Market and to Radical Transparency (the aforementioned Posterous blog).

Filed under  //   clay shirky   experiments   posterous   storytelling   twitter  

Favoriting would be excellent.  Gotta get me to the great posts to favorite though too.  Zero me in on the stuff I'll like.  Maybe have users tag themselves with the stuff they think they'll like and tag their blogs with the stuff that they think users will like about the blogs?

For example, I tag myself with energy, sustainability, dinosaurs, and metaphors, and I tag Radical Transparency with energy, sustainability, and Ween. 

And then the matchmaking begins.  Or something like that.

But you're the expert.  You have a good thing going.  I love the simplicity.  I love the integration with existing blogs (I'll be playing with that in a couple of weeks when I'll have no internet but my cell phone email for 5 days).  And I love that you responded to feedback so fast.  Means a lot.  Makes me root for you.  Makes me want to keep thinking and offering you guys any ideas I have.  Well done.

Hmmm.

I wonder what happens if I cc post@posterous.com on this email.  I'll trim up the text below and see.  I hope you don't mind.

Filed under  //   feedback   online community   posterous   tagging  

I forgot to make Be My Yoko Ono an .mp3 file before writing about it and posting it. I attached it as an .m4a file to the email I sent to posterous. 

Then I went to the website and the edit post interface try to replace the .m4a with an .mp3.

When I tried to edit, the only sign of the .m4a file was a bit of text or code at the bottom of the post body. 

As a first step, I deleted that. 

But I couldn't see any obvious way to add the .mp3 file (and the little player in which posterous so kindly bundles it up), so I saved the edit and went back to the blog to see if I'd actually deleted the m4a file.

I had, but I figured there had to be some way to attach an .mp3, so I tried editing again. 

But, alas, I think I might have broken something.  I can't edit the body of a bunch of my posts anymore.  Some, mysteriously, I can, but definitely not all.

Anyway, I don't know what the problem is, and I don't know if the posterous folks troll these posts for functionality feedback or vague bug reports, but I figure since posterous gives me this tool for free, I should throw this little experience up here just in case it might be of some use.

And, of course, I need to get the song up somehow.

Filed under  //   complaining   feedback   music   posterous  

I thought for a little while that I was going to do a song of the day on tumblr.  Didn't happen.  Probably because I never did the Google search necessary to figure out how to turn .m4a files into .mp3 files.  Silly.  Lazy.  But, that's the way it went.

And, now, since Posterous caught me at a less lazy moment, a moment in which I took the plunge and downloaded an .m4a to .mp3 converter, I'll give a go at blogging some songs.

Something about the way Jay-Z thanks the audience in this track that really gets me.  I don't think I've ever heard a live show start off better.  What with the internets and the shriveling record sales business, I don't think anything's more important than on stage audience engagement.  Jay-Z knows what he's doing.

Filed under  //   big music   concerts   jay-z   music   posterous   tumblr   unplugged  

Had a silly question, so I ran over to Twitter to ask it, and, as soon as I clicked update to post it up, the fail whale told me scheduled maintenance had begun, and it'll be about an hour before Twitter's back up and running.

Crazy timing: I'm not sure if I just barely got the tweet posted or I just missed getting it posted.

Just in case, and since Posterous always lets me send it emails (I think; I hope), I'm going to go ahead and post the intended "tweet" here: 

What's the opposite of a conservative estimate? An aggressive estimate? An unconservative estimate? A liberal estimate? Cowboy math?

Excellent. Thought's out of my head. I've released the cow. All's good. Thank you thank you.

One point for Posterous. Zero points for Twitter. Or one point for Twitter, depending on whether I snuck the tweet under the fail whale's slamming iron gate (You know those gates that are inside drawbridges and stuff? Robin Hood era castle defense systems?).

Anyway, the moral of the story, I think, is that this might be a competition. Sometimes. There are those tweener thoughts that probably can be expressed in 140 characters but maybe might do well with a couple of sentences of context. Hmmm. I do love context. We'll see.

Filed under  //   cowboy math   estimates   fail whale   opposites   posterous   releasing the cow   twitter  

Filed under  //   posterous   privacy   twitter