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What Mr. & Mrs. Fitch Do and Do Not Get About Social Media

Published

on February 22, 2010

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Mr. & Mrs. Fitch on Twitter

Went to see Mr. & Mrs. Fitch with my friend, J. Hotham the other night. While, it was impossible not to love the tender yet jaded but still lovingly crafted characters, I was constantly distracted by playwright, Douglas Carter Beane’s limited understanding of social media.

From Susannaspeier.com

Its not like everyone has to follow every subtle nuance of the perpetually fluctuating world of social media. Given the fact it was the literal as well as metaphoric world of the play, however, couldn’t Beane have solicited the assistance of a slightly more tech savvy dramaturg? If that wasn’t in the budget, all he’d have needed to do was offer up free lattes and he’d have had a swarm of geeks at his beckon call in no time flat.

Lithgow as Fitch on Twitter

John Lithgow portrayal of Mr. Fitch was sublime. No surprise there. Had the guy been a Brit, he’d have been knighted years ago. But once again, I couldn’t help but be hopelessly distracted by his character’s Twitter dismissives:
I inhaled/
I exhaled/
which do you like more — inhaling or exhaling?
Twitter characterization.

From Susannaspeier.com

How could Lithgow’s character –a journalist whose success had bought him a luxury loft in a great neighborhood– not have known better.

The First Thing Mr. & Mrs. Fitch Would Have Known About

The epic paradigm shattering, “arrested” Tweet that photojournalism student James Buck sent his followers in April 2009 from the backseat of a police car headed towards the Nile Delta city of Mahalla, Egypt! Not only did this epic tweet succeed in alerting the US State Department –who arranged diplomatic intervention that would lead to a subsequent tweet of “Free” in less than 24 hours– it defined the vital role Twitter would play on future hotspot stages.

The Second Thing Mr. & Mrs. Fitch Would Have Known About

The New York Times hosted Social Media Week Crowdsourcing Panel and the upcoming Shorty Awards, (also scheduled to take place in the Times building). If this isn’t proof enough that the new era of journalism is now being championed and embraced by print journalism then Jennifer Preston’s @NYT_JenPreston recent appointment as New York Times Social Media Editor ought to be.

How To Fix All This

Had the playwright asked lead actor, John Lithgow @john_lithgow for a guided tour of the Twittersphere, the story that probes the delicious topic what happens when a credible journalist fabricates would likely have taken too ambiguous a route for its traditional narrative arc to sustain. Mr. & Mrs. Fitch, like the fictitious article the leading characters create are there to entertain, rather than draw their audience into a metaphysical Charlie Kaufmanesque quandary. An up to date depiction of how social media is changing print journalism might have therefore caused the genre’s hard drive to crash. Set the play sometime in late 2007 or even early 2008, however and the portrayal would have been relatively accurate.

Lithgow as Lithgow on Twitter

From Susannaspeier.com

Sustaining Exurbia

Published

s000z

on January 8, 2010

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Nick Roberts just responded to yesterday’s Exurbia post saying how impressed he is with Max, Hannah, and Lily’s grasp of Exurbia and then challenged them with the following questions:

How sustainable is it?
What happens after the end of oil? and…
What if the internet doesn’t work?

From Exurbia

Max: I don’t care about the end of oil but without internet I’d die.

Hannah: We’d be completely alone in the world.

Lily: And we’d never, ever be able to meet anybody. We couldn’t even call anybody.

Hannah: We wouldn’t be able to get out of Exurbia.

Lily: No, we wouldn’t be able to get out of Exurbia in our lives.

Max: We have seven Macs.

Jason: Eight Macs, with Max.
(Jason is the dad, btw)

Max: Any my iPod Touch.

Jennifer: Who left the door opened? We don’t want to leave the door opened because of snakes. Rattlesnakes. Saw a four foot long one the other day.
(Jennifer, is the mom)

And thanks to yours truly, you can now (as of yesterday) discuss Nick’s questions with each individual family member on his and/or her respective personal blog. Here are their urls:

lilypiette.blogspot.com
hannahpiette.blogspot.com
outoftheboxorganics.blogspot.com
slowlifeadventure.blogspot.com
jasonpiette.blogspot.com

From Exurbia

Photo of Jason and Lily, blogging in Exurbia.

Malibu, Exurbia

Published

s000z

on January 7, 2010

. 4 Comments

From Exurbia

I asked my cousins Hannah (age 10), Lily (age 7) and Max (age 12) to blog with me about Malibu, Exurbia. We started by taking turns typing Exurbia blurbs:

From Exurbia

Lily’s Exurbia Blurb - Exurbia is some where out of the city, it is some where were we live, it feels like your far away from shops, and anything. It looks like nothing but tree’s and wild all around you. the only other living things we see are wild animals. One wild animal could be a coyote, or a mountiain lion, or a deer.

From Exurbia

Max’s Exurbia Blurb - I don’t have much to say about living in Exurbia, except that it is not really Exurbia it’s isolated Exurbia. We are fifteen minutes away from any civilization. We’re the Exurbia of Malibu. Every town has its Exurbia.

From Exurbia

Hannah’s Exurbia Blurb - No, civilization is right down the road! There is a restaurant called Neptune’s Net, just 5 minutes away! The bad thing about living in Exurbia is that say, you don’t have any milk, and you have a biscotti, which is the only thing that you can eat in the house, you have no milk to dunk the cookie in, so the biscotti is rock hard! But the nearest grocery store is 15-20 minutes away, its not worth driving that much for a gallon of milk. Also, if you are a kid, you don’t have billions of neighbors who have kids to play with, so it is hard to meet new people.

From Exurbia

Susanna’s Exurbia Blurb - There’s a lot of light in Exurbia, and I like how you can diffuse it at different times of the day, and feel time pass.

From Exurbia

Hannah then pointed out that we still need to define Exurbia since readers might not know what Exurbia is. A good point given the fact I’d only learned about Exurbia yesterday when Nick Roberts, who designed the home with his wife, Cory Buckner, told me that living out here on the farthest edge of Malibu was living in Exurbia. So, I decided to transcribe our attempt to collaboratively define Exurbia. At Max’s insistence, I am putting “collaboratively” in quotation marks.

From Exurbia

The Definition of Exurbia

Hannah: I think we have to define what Exurbia is.

Susanna: Okay. What is Exurbia?

Lilly: Exurbia is somewhere out of the city.

Max: Basically where nobody is. A town that really isn’t because everybody moved into the suburbs. It’s basically a ghost town. Where nobody lives. If Malibu was a heart, we’d have pins and needles.

Hannah: What?

Max: Because pins and needles is when you don’t have enough blood. If Malibu was a heart and people were blood; we’d have pins and needles.

Hannah: Which is when you don’t have enough blood.

Max: What’s that sickness when you don’t have enough blood in your body or something?

Hannah: It’s not a sickness. It’s just when your foot goes all tickly.

From Exurbia

Lily: Can I say something about Exurbia?

Max: This is amazing. You’re just, like, writing. She’s writing down everything we say.

Lily: Oh, I know what I wanna say.

Max: I like that I can say anything and everybody will read it.

Lily: Okay, I know what I wanna say. Exurbia is. Somewhere. Where there’s basically no, um.

Max: The government should like hire you for those people at interviews who write down what the suspects say.

Hannah: Don’t interrupt Lily. Otherwise this blog is going to get boring.

Max: You wrote down—

Lily: –now, nobody interrupt. Okay this is what I’m gonna say. Exurbia is somewhere where there’s no buildings or cars or streets or houses or pollution.

Max: Well, yeah there is. It floats up. You can see the smog from where we live.

Lily: uh. and there’s gonna be. there’s like. no. No traffic lights. And there’s no grocery stores.

Max: And this place caught on fire as well. Like a long time ago, though.

Lily: Max, don’t interrupt. I’m trying to say something.

Max: Yeah, but you’re just blabbering on.

From Exurbia

Hannah: Max, don’t interrupt please.

Max: You constantly interrupt me.

Lily: This is what I wanna say. Just stop it Max. I think that Exurbia is somewhere where there is nothing that you see in a city.

Max: It’s warmer here.

Hannah: No, no, no.

Max: No, no, no. It depends on which suburbs. Because we’re a suburb of Point Doom which is closer to the sea and the sea makes it cold. It’s true.

Lily: Okay but this is what I wanna say.

Max: We’re also a suburb of a Thousand Oaks. Which is much hotter than here.

Lily: This is what I say. That Exurbia is nothing like a city.

From Exurbia

Hannah: You already did that.
Max: You said that already.

The People of Exurbia

Hannah: Okay. I’m going to give my explanation of Exurbia now. Exurbia. Is basically the mountains or the desert where its the wilderness except for some occasional houses. There are other people living in Exurbia. We know two or three. Like. four. We know a lot of people that live near us. That also live in Exurbia. It’s not like we’re the only ones here. The whole mountainside full of people.

Max: Well….full

Hannah: Still quite a lot. I think Lily and Max are exaggerating on how unpopulated Exurbia is.

Max: We may be exaggerating but you’re underestimating.

Hannah: There are many other Exurbias than our mountainside. All over the world.

Lily: Okay, this is is. Well, I think Exurbia. Well, actually. We. I only know two people.

Hannah: I know much many. I know one, two, three, four, five six, seven.
Max: Oh, seven’s a big number. It’s just an itty, bitty…

Hannah: It’s just that you don’t know anyone, Max.

From Exurbia

Click here, if you’d like to read an earlier Hannah, Lily and Max post.

Click here to read their next adventure in Exurbia

New Year’s Resolutions

Published

s000z

on January 3, 2010

. 3 Comments

This Place is so Insanely Beautiful

I’m on top of a mountain in Malibu. Skies are blue, blue, blue. What else needs to be said? Well, its the beginning of 2010 and so lotsa stuff, actually…

New Year’s Resolution 2010 Biblio

I realize process of making and keeping New Year’s Resolutions is (or should be, at any rate) quite obvious. It doesn’t hurt to start by Google-ing up a refresher or two, though.

Also worth mentioning nothing what the top New Year’s Resolutions are and what overall stats are for keeping them. There’s a ton out there on the topic — everything from New Year’s Resolutions statistics, making New Year’s Resolutions, funny New Year’s Resolutions, New Year’s Resolutions for Kids, Broken New Year’s Resolutions, Green New Year’s Resolutions…

I created the following list by eliminating articles from sites trying to sell charts and virtual coaching software subscriptions. This is what I ended up with:

The Top New Year’s Resolutions, according to a US Government Poll — yr tax paying dollars at work, presumably

Psychology Today New Year’s Resolution advice

New Year’s Resolutions for NYC — Freakin’ hilarious NYTimes article (doubtful these will be of general interest, tho)

WebMD New Year’s Resolution advice

New Year’s Resolutions are for Dorkazoids

And in case you haven’t already figure this out — I’m into making New Year’s Resolutions. I’m even into keeping them. I realize I’m a total dork for taking New Year’s Resolutions so seriously. Fortunately, my dorkazoid status has little to no impact on my ability to make and maintain New Year’s Resolutions. Solipsism is, after all, part of the dorkazoid credo.

Acceptance of the Dorkazoid Credo

Dorkazoid credo acceptance also helps me get over the fact that making New Year’s Resolutions means admitting to the deepest, darkest storm clouds of shame, failure and self-loathing. For this brief moment in time, I will not allow these clouds to come between me and this clear day in Malibu.

What Happened With My 2009 New Year’s Resolution

Five hours a day of writing. Believe it or not, I met my goal. Only problem was that I didn’t connect my writing goals with financial goals.

Fact is, despite those few and far between entrepreneurial success stories, it is not easy to earn a living by creating online content. Even content published on insanely high traffic blogs like the Huffington Post doesn’t pay.

Although I published over 100 articles only a small percent of my words connected to market pay. Most of the paid gigs were for print publications. Print publications also provide a lot more editorial feedback and vital resources such as fact checkers, art directors and regularly accessible Editor-in-Chiefs.

Not that I, in any way, regret last year’s resolution. Seeing Politiku featured in Huffpo and then syndicated by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Newsweek was, of course, rewarding. I continue to Politiku. Just not as frequently. Same with other online publications I contribute to.

Hopefully my 2010 resolutions will protect me from neglecting my longer term and more substantial aspirations such as screenwriting, playwriting, publishing more articles in print magazines and continuing to create optimized web content for clients who can afford to pay market rates for my talent, education and expertise.

2010 New Year’s Resolutions

Resolution #1 - Don’t allow the number of pro-bono or even below market rate assignments to exceed paid ones. Unfortunately, Huffpo bloggers don’t get paid. Am therefore trying to figure out how to maintain my beloved Politiku column on the level I’m currently maintaining it on without having to sacrifice self-sufficiency.

Resolution #2 - Arrive five minutes early whenever possible
Best technique I can think of for improving punctuality.

Resolution #3 - Two days a week working out at the gym. Incredibly trite, compared to what some people do. Never been much of a gym rat, though but again, the key to succeeding is making resolutions that can be realistically maintained.

Resolution #4 - Full-time, long-term ‘dayjob’ - Having this stability will vastly increase my effectiveness in all other areas. It will enable me to pick and choose freelance gigs, rather than simply trying to be ubiquitously published. It will also enable me to refocus on screenplays. Hopefully, acting wont have to be entirely sacrificed since it’s something I love and will continue to need to always be doing, and always be needing to do, in some capacity.

Resolution #5 - I haven’t figured out the fifth one yet. I prefer odd numbers to even so I’ve decided to leave it as ’standby’. Suggestions?

Between Now and 2011

There are other things that I need to do or am planning on doing. I’ll need to trust myself to do those other things –breaking them down into smaller steps and setting deadlines for those steps– without a resolution. Again, keeping resolutions realistic, mundane and ultimately doable increases the likelihood of its actually getting maintained through 2011.

How did things go with your 2009 resolutions?

What are your New Year’s Resolutions for 2010?

If you’d like to read my Huffington Post Politiku Neuroeconomics for New Years click here.

Social Media 101: when in doubt, Vark

Published

s000z

on October 26, 2009

. 2 Comments

From Blog Archive

It isn’t difficult to ‘get’ social media

That is, it isn’t difficult so long as you avoid empty caloried, time sucking applications involving cupcakes, first person dog profiles and ‘Which 80s sitcom characters are you’ quizzes on Facebook. Linkedin’s also great. Be aware, however that, though a great business resource, is more of a supplementary research tool as its unspontaneous and self-sterilizing nature kind of prevents it from being much else.

Twitter is a culture

Of all social media, twitter offers the ultimate flexibility in terms of branding and rapid niche connecting. Though a ton of stuff is being written about it, IMHO, if you just follow “Trust Agents” author Chris Brogan’s tweets, read his blog posts and check out his streamed webinars, you should be fine. Chris is like that super nice summer camp councilor all the girls had crushes on because, well, because he was so nice. Brogan is humanizing, fair, community oriented and seems to perpetually exudes this ability to make more friends in a day than many make in a year. Given that trust and transparency are his credo, his personality is hard to resist.

Listen to the linguists

As cerebral as Chris Brogan is warm, fuzzy, entertaining and anecdotal, when it comes to Web content, linguist Ginny Redish is clear, focused and streamline. Her definitive book on the topic, “Letting Go of the Words” is mercifully readable and thankfully user oriented. Be prepared to apply design principles to your words and expect to emerge with an updated arsenal of margin notes, color coding, Sans Serif, chunking and contextual clarity. Redish’s book so thorough that it is really the only actual investment you’ll need to make to learn about writing for the web.

Arianna Huffington is blogging, okay?

Though social media stars are generally famous for something achieved outside of their viral social media realm, with bloggers that is not necessarily the case. Think of Perez Hilton. Arianna Huffington is the living embodiment of the new media blogging superstar and her status is will deserved. The Huffington Post provides everything from Pelosi to Politiku (the latter of the two, being a passion project of yours truly:-) “The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging” is about as comprehensive as it gets. As with, “Letting Go of the Words” once you’ve got it, you can go ahead and return your big yellow For Dummies volumes to the bookshelf…right back where you found them.

Knowing how to ask

Whether it’s where to go to learn more about SEO optimization, or how to treat a cat’s eye infection, be keyword sensitive, bearing in mind that a computer is categorizing your question. Aardvark.com (with a url that uses the shortened, Vark.com) will try and match the question to someone who can answer. Set up an account and it hooks you in through your Facebook network. Vark is undoubtedly one of social media’s best kept secrets. Not only is it a great when all else fails option. It’s also actually a good place to start your research.

When in doubt, Vark

As with Social Media, blogging has no epicenter. Also, like the others it offers multiple entry points with multiple hubs around which multiple identities can cluster and congregate. What is different with Aardvark is that it is information, as opposed to personality, driven. Questions are matched with compatible information providers who, like everyone registered on Aardvark, is encouraged to both ask as well as respond to questions. If the answers the current online members aren’t doing it for you, you have simply to resubmit and Aardvark will send on to the next round. Still not working, then resubmit. Still not? Then use Vark to ask someone on Vark to help you understand what’s going on.

If you’re into this kinda stuff, you should also be sure to check out the post about how Daylight Saving Time and how Google trends can lead you grammatically astray.

I’m One of Networked Blogs’ Top 50 Film Blogs

Published

s000z

on October 21, 2009

. 2 Comments

Go figure! Here’s the linkie - http://www.networkedblogs.com/topic/Film/Have no idea how they decide on these things but I guess I’ve made it to Networked Blogs’ (part of Facebook) Top 50 Film Blogs.

Defining a Multi-Topical Blog
Film might not be the focus of most of my posts but when I weighed the options: Do I write a political blog? No, not really. All the real-deal political writers wouldn’t think so, anyway. Politiku is politics, yes, but fancified. And I only post my Politiku on Huffington now anyway, for SEO purposes.

And, yes, I write a lot about science. I’m not a scientist, though. Nor am I a Search Engine Optimizer, though I write about Search Engine Optimization.

Embracing Hot Topics
Boring as this may be, I simply write about about whatever inspires me. New hot topics like SEO, yeah, I’m into it. Into it in so far as I’ve been doing it for almost a year now and am just starting to embrace this particular “hot topic” as a new direction in which to take my freelance writing. What prompted me to embrace it was not the “hotness,” so much as it was the pragmatic simplicity of gaining a skill that there is an abundance of demand for. Well, okay, that is “hotness” maybe?

Film vs Optimized Content
Unlike film –in which, content is an end in and of itself– the SEO stuff I write about creates content based on trending terms. In other words, content is determined by the swarm rather than from within.

Thank you, Networked Blogs
So, thank you, Networked Blogs, for putting my ‘Film Blog’ in your top 50. Glad to hear you like what I have to say about film. Back to trying to find an agent to represent my unsold screenplays and back to trying to find new clients while seeking out a real job to get me by. And yes, perhaps a real job that would involve writing in some capacity but I’ll take a permanent position with health insurance over that, any day. In other words, if you –yes, you the reader– need someone to create Search Engine Optimized, keyword rich content, even better!

So…ya wanna read more of my SEO stuff? Click here.

Daylight Savings Time 2009 optimized

Published

s000z

on October 18, 2009

. 0 Comments

Last spring’s Daylight Savings Time post is increasing my current daily blog traffic over 500%. Reason? Three of them, actually:

1.) Daylight savings time is near an end

2.) Everyone is googling the term to figure out which exact day that end is gonna fall on.

3.) The search engines aren’t differentiating between beginning and end when discussing Daylight Saving Time.

There’s another reason, too. Kind of an accidental one. Rather than titling this post with the correct, yet under utilized, singular form of the word, “saving,” I deliberately and incorrectly pluralized it. Here is why:

Search Engine Optimization -
According to Google’s Adwords Keyword Tool, the global monthly search volume for “Daylight Savings” is 1,000,000. The grammatically correct “Daylight Saving” global monthly search volume, on the other hand, is a mere 368,000.

From Blog Archive

The Economy -
Were this a boom economy, I might well have chosen to use the phrase consistent with the National Institute of Standards and Time in my title.

Given the ubiquitously strained job market everyone is dealing with, however, it is in my best interest to revert to the inaccurate yet optimized Googleadwords.com degeneration of Daylight Saving because it will increase web traffic thereby optimizing my chances of my attracting a potential client or employer during this edge of the close of yet another end of Daylight Saving cycle.

In other words: this is me compromising my grammatical integrity in order to appeal to the larger, inaccurate, populous because I need a job.

From Blog Archive

Spring Forward / Fall Back -
“Spring Forward / Fall Back” is the best –not to mention, most accurate– colloquial way I know of to remember this stuff. Unfortunately it is limited to the direction in which you need to move your clock and provides nothing about how to remember the actual day of the year that this switch falls on.

The Day That Daylight Saving Time 2009 Ends -
Last spring’s title phrase, “Why Daylight Savings Time Makes Me Miss My Atomic Clock” post not only falls short grammatically; it fails to provide the day and time that daylight saving time 2009 is scheduled to end: November 1st at 2:00a.m.

Because I used the accurate term, “Daylight Saving” (rather than “Daylight Savings”) chances are that this section, though most relevant to the majority of the readers of this post, will attract less attention from those long legged google spiders who will eventually crawl it.

Google’s Long Legged Spiders -
Doubtful as it is that the phrase, “November 1st at 2:00a.m.” will prompt those long legged spiders to unravel and reweave but at least now the peops who googled, “Daylight Savings” –the majority, in other words– will get the information they came here to find.

From Blog Archive

Not a computer geek? That’s okay. You can read my history geek Daylight Saving post, then.

Original 1984 Apple Macintosh M0001 Computer Revisiting

Published

s000z

on September 20, 2009

. 0 Comments

Crazy but true, Mom actually hung on to the very same 128K M0001 Macintosh that Dad purchased shortly after the-most-expensive-commercial-to-date launched said iconic prototype in the midst of the 1984 Superbowl. Directed by Ridley Scott and perhaps the most prophetic commercial in television history, it only aired once and once was enough. Enter: the dawn of the digital happy face.

And so here it is, 25 years later and here I am, Marsha Collier’s “eBay for Dummies” by my side, running this eBay auction. This German guy, Lars who I met through Retromaccast has been with me every step of the way, even going so far as to create customized diagrams, to help me on my way towards a working computer again. While it may not be the Gene Roddenberry’s Mac (which, coincidentally, just went up for auction this week as well) it’s got an archival integrity that is hard to match, thanks to my mom, a retired librarian, who kept almost all of the fliers, documentation and even a couple of the original boxes.

From Vintage Macs

Simply Shameless Ebay Shop Shill: So, as my goal is to get it to a worthy new owner, if you’re a collector and wanna check it out and perhaps even place a bid, here’s the link.

The names of the original creators are etched into the inside shell of the original M0001 models. Folklore.org has the entire story of the signing party and an image of the original signature sheet created February 1982. According to Andy Hertzfeld who wrote the post, this was a very conscious effort on Steve Jobs’ part.

From The Macintosh M0001 Turned Inside Out

He thought of himself as an artist and encouraged his team to think of themselves that way, too. Of course that’s all obvious now, in retrospect. When I think about the promethean spirit driving those signatures in a world still dominated by “Basic” and “Pilot” and “IBM” is has to have been one of the fiercest humanistic moments in the history of personal computing. It also makes Ridley Scott’s stream fusing and metaphoric layering all the most dazzling and the experience of uncovering it, last week when picking the computer up after an internal hard drive repair, that much more satisfying.

Why there’s more to SEO than tags and trending terms

Published

s000z

on August 31, 2009

. 0 Comments

I approached last week’s SEO workshop dubiously. According to my understanding (which is based on what friends who do this stuff all the time) the best way to draw more traffic to your blog is simply to write all the time. And that’s not totally untrue. What’s also true, however, is that my neologistic propensity does not serve me well, when it comes to interacting with the creepy crawlie google spiders that be. Take, for example, the term SEO. Should I, on a whim, decide to refer to it as ‘Essie-oh’ instead, then, yes, my number of hits actually would go down. Maybe not due to that alone but certainly it plays a factor in it. So its a strange way to think about writing, basically, some words’ll crawl better than other words. Plain as that. Am I having a deja vu right now? Maybe. Lucky for me, the site doesn’t earn any money so there’s not reason to draw a certain target margin demographic to a particular page. Shall I further explain? I’m less cynical about it than I’m coming across, actually. But I’m tired nevertheless. Okay, more soon.

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Sustaining Exurbia